NEW YORK—John Oliver is glad Canadians voted out Stephen Harper in the last federal election.

“We did a piece on the Canadian election just because it seemed a very good idea to just not have Stephen Harper anymore,” Oliver told the Star last week at HBO’s corporate headquarters in midtown Manhattan.

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver did indeed do an election-eve show telling Canadians not to vote Harper. It featured a giant beaver, a moose and Mike Myers dressed as a Mountie on a snowplow.

Oliver ran down a list of what he saw as Harper’s sins, including passing laws weakening environmental protection, scaling back health care for refugees and pandering to Islamophobes.

So, yes, he’s happy Canada got rid of Harper.

“It’s almost like if you could just not take heroin, then let’s work out some positive life choices once we’ve got that out of your system,” says Oliver.

The British-born comedian returns this Sunday at 11 p.m. with a third season of Last Week Tonight on HBO Canada. He has quickly made a reputation as the fearless outsider of late night. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The former Daily Show correspondent took a winning stand for net neutrality, interviewed whistleblower Edward Snowden and formed his own church, “Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption.” The latter was to demonstrate how “disturbingly easy” it is in America to set up a tax-exempt religious organization.

Oliver appealed to viewers to send him money, one dollar at a time. The ploy, vetted by HBO lawyers, has so far seen $70,000 (U.S.) come in, all of it turned over to Doctors Without Borders.

Yet congratulate Oliver on righting wrongs or making a difference and he becomes embarrassed. He cringes at the suggestion that there’s a “John Oliver effect.”

“I don’t think of the impact beyond the show because I’m just thinking about the next show,” he says. “I think about whether each joke is going to be funny enough and whether we can make the joke funnier. We don’t think about the after effects.”

He waves off the Time magazine salute, insisting that they “say a lot of things that are woefully inaccurate and that is definitely one of them.”

Pressed to take some credit for net neutrality, at least, he doubles down. “If I am one of the 100 most influential people in the world, this planet is f---ed.”

The 38-year-old satirist believes there is way too much attention paid to the “absurdly bloated” American election process. “This borderline three-year election cycle is not healthy by any metric.”

The endless election coverage also brings its own challenges, says Oliver.

“Sometimes it’s hard to joke a joke,” he says. “If people are already laughing off the back of the clip, the joke has kind of been told.”

He denies any interest in targeting Donald Trump or any other specific politician.

“Our show will probably deal with the process (rather) than the personalities involved. There will be plenty of places to get jokes and commentary about the people who are running.”

The Birmingham, England, native embraces his outsider status. He has a Green Card but is not an American citizen. “I think most people in the world are forced to have a basic working knowledge of American democracy because we’re on the receiving end of it,” he says.

He does have real journalists on his staff who chase down facts and quotes in an effort to get things right. “We have to make sure that everything is accurate,” he says, pointing out there are severe legal risks in taking on Corporate America.

Just as important, to Oliver, is that “the ground we’re standing on has to be structurally sound for the joke to work, otherwise it collapses. You can’t build it on sand.”

Oliver has his own code, striving to find humour even in deadly serious situations such as the bombings near the Stade de France in Paris last November.

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“We wrote that the morning of the show and it was very difficult,” he says. “There’d been a lot of sad, heartfelt reaction in the States and I guess I feel our show is not really a place for sad, heartfelt reaction.”

The result was some cathartic, angry, profane calling out of the terrorists. “We didn’t need to fact-check that one too much,” he says. Oliver found a balance that was swift, searing and silly. He was heartened to hear a journalist from France suggest it be embraced at home.

Oliver sees no shortage of absurd targets in the season ahead. Take Sean Penn and the recent Rolling Stone fiasco. He chastises the magazine for “giving one of the biggest drug dealers on Earth a final edit on your story. That’s a sad day.”

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