CANDY CRUSH
CBC has high hopes for its new radio host, gay native feminist comic Candy Palmater,
It’s a warm Saturday afternoon and Candy Palmater is at home enjoying a day off from the hectic pace of preparing to host her new weekday afternoon program on CBC’s Radio One.
Dressed casually, Palmater, 47, sits in her living room, sipping water from a plastic cup, her wife and manager Denise Tompkins, 45, comfortably reclined on a chair beside her.
Palmater shows a visitor some of her 18 body tattoos, including the large one on her lower right leg of a shawl dancer. She also has tattoos of her late brother, Bill, her mother, Pearl, and late father, Guy.
Candy Palmater is one colourful individual.
“When I’m asked to describe myself, I always say I’m a gay native recovered lawyer turned feminist comic, who was raised by bikers in the wilds of northern New Brunswick,” she says in an interview with the Star.
She tackles sensitive issues such as race, self-acceptance, body image and sexuality in her motivational speeches and no-holds-barred standup-comedy routines. And when she launches The Candy
Palmater Show, starting Monday (Monday to Friday, 1 to 3 p.m. EDT), she plans to delve into the “human experience” in all its complexities.
“It’s a theme that runs through all my work,” she says. “I’m very interested in loving kindness and the notion of self-acceptance. I feel like every time you open a magazine, watch a movie, turn on the television, you’re constantly being told you’re not enough: not rich enough, not pretty enough, not thin enough . . .
“I think we’re all more than enough, but we’re not told that often enough. So I hope through the stories we’re going to tell on the show, even through the tunes we’re going to play, we’ll keep enforcing that positive, hopeful message. I’m looking for ways that we can connect with one another — I want listeners to connect with me but also connect with one another.
“I’ll be your sugar rush, your sweet treat every afternoon to get you through the end of your workday.”
Palmater, born to a white mother and Mi’kmaq father in Point La Nim, N.B., has extensive television experience, including her own comedy and musical variety show on APTN, called The Candy Show, and a recurring role on the Trailer Park Boys.
She has guest-hosted on CBC Radio programs DNTO and Q.
When she was 32, she left her labour-law practice to work for the Nova Scotia government and pursue a career in entertainment. That’s the year she ended a 12-year relationship with a man, and announced to her parents that she was gay.
Palmater landed on CBC’s radar in the aftermath of the Jian Ghomeshi sex scandal. After Ghomeshi was turfed as host of Q, the flagship arts and entertainment radio program, in late 2014, the network cast about for replacements. Palmater was one of the guest hosts last year, before the CBC settled on host Shadrach Kabango, a.k.a. Shad, in March 2015.
Leslie Merklinger, director of new programs and talent development for CBC Radio One, says Palmater “really drew our attention” during the Qshows that she hosted.
“She popped for us in a particular way that we really thought there’s something special here. She has a real presence; she’s incredibly warm and authentic and smart and talented.”
Last year, Merklinger had followup meetings with Palmater, who she believed was a good fit for the CBC. The question was where.
“It’s my job to find gems,” Merklinger says. “I heard something in (Palmater) that was extraordinary. I just thought wow, there’s someone with an amazing range of experience who can connect with Canadians across the board.
“She’s clearly brilliant, has a beautiful radio voice and is superbly intelligent . . . She has such a warmth and a real desire to do good with the opportunity she has to talk to people,” Merklinger says. She sees Palmater as an amazing storyteller with a “beautiful command” of the language.
She adds that Palmater — with her aboriginal background and her “ultra-modern, alternate lifestyle, tattooed way” — can be a new voice for millennial listeners.
Minelle Mahtani, an assistant pro- fessor in journalism at the University of Toronto and an expert in diversity issues in the media, says she’s thrilled at the choice of Palmater noting that she arrives with impressive credentials.
“She has an irreverent and comedic approach to social issues,” Mahtani said in an email. “She will bring a fresh, unparalleled perspective to the CBC.”
Mahtani adds she’s impressed the CBC is giving an aboriginal a “position of power within the organization.”
Palmater’s show will run over the summer, in place of repeats of programs such as the technologythemed Spark. “We’re hopeful the show will continue past the summer,” says Merklinger.
Palmater hopes the show will be a forum to talk about “difficult things and fun things” in a respectful way, where the audience will hear different viewpoints. “We all know the white perspective,” she says. Is she anxious? “I’m nervous for sure. I feel like all my ancestors are leaned up behind me. When has this ever happened? When has a native person in general ever had the opportunity to talk to the nation for two hours a day? A native woman?
“The CBC is taking a chance on me.”
‘I’m leaving law to become a comedian’
Palmater was raised in northern New Brunswick. Her parents, Guy and Pearl, had seven children. One son had Down syndrome and died in infancy; another died as an adult from cancer.
Palmater grew up in a three-bedroom bungalow that her father built when she was 4. Often he would note the family was fortunate to have a clean, comfortable home.
“He grew up in a tarpaper lean-to,” Palmater says.
Palmater’s father was an alcoholic starting in his teens. Her parents had six children who were exposed to his excessive drinking, but he wanted to have one child while clean and sober, so when he was 46, and Pearl 43, they had Candy.
That was 1968. A year later, the couple opened a Harley-Davidson dealership in Point La Nim.
Palmater’s father “wanted to isolate himself to stay sober, so he bought land up in the woods in the mountains,” she recalls. “That’s where the dealership was. So I was only exposed, until Grade 1 when I went to school, to my brothers and sisters and the bikers who came to the shop.”
Her father died a few years ago at 87, sober for many decades.
By1995, at age 26, Candy Palmater’s activist bent was clearly coming through. She was saving money for law school by working the 11 p.m.-to-7 a.m. shift at a Halifax Tim Hortons for about $5 an hour. In a bid to improve working conditions related to ensuring time off for vacations, breaks during shifts and proper plac- es to eat lunch, Palmater helped lead a drive to unionize the staff, which succeeded.
But soon after that, staff were laid off and the franchise owner bulldozed the store, according to a news report at the time in the Coast, a Halifax weekly. For Palmater, it was a bitter lesson in labour relations.
She entered law school at Dalhousie University at age 27, and at graduation there was, as she describes it, “a lot of hullabaloo” when she was chosen valedictorian for her class, a rarity for an aboriginal woman. She landed her first job at a firm, where she practiced labour law. But she soon found this unfulfilling.
She now jokes that she lasted about three seconds as a lawyer. (It was actually about a year.)
“I was in a room with a lot of paper . . . basically helping companies. Helping rich people get richer,” she says.
The year she turned 32 was a big one. Palmater realized her soul “wasn’t growing” in law. So she took a job with the Nova Scotia government in aboriginal affairs, which later led to her directing First Nations education in the province, including for her Mi’kmaq community.
The 9-to-5 job also gave her the chance to pursue her passion for being an entertainer, at night and on weekends. She ended a 12-year relationship with her partner, and six months later got involved with Tompkins.
Palmater remembers calling home: “Mom and Dad, I’m leaving law to become a comedian, and PS I broke up with my boyfriend because I’m gay. I love you. Goodbye.”
Palmater, who talks openly about her weight — “well over 300 pounds’’ — wasn’t always that heavy. As a teen and young adult, she was extremely fit, downhill skiing and playing basketball and baseball.
Her first love was volleyball. She won a provincial championship with her high school team and earned MVP honours on her varsity squad in university. But when her brother Bill died during her second year of law school, she says she ate her way through the pain of losing him.
Palmater says her comedy doesn’t come from a place of shame and she always tries to slip in important social messages.
“I never make myself the butt of the joke. I won’t throw natives under the bus or fat women under the bus or gay people,” she says. “If I make a joke about my size, it’s about being large and in charge. It’s always from a place of power.”
Tompkins calls the new CBC gig “definitely the next level for us. The world needs to hear more of her and this is a great platform.”
“I’m nervous for sure. . . . When has this ever happened? When has a native person in general ever had the opportunity to talk to the nation for two hours a day?” CANDY PALMATER