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In a spare room in his Ottawa home, Kevin Bosch keeps boxes upon boxes of Lego sorted by body type, clothing colour and hair. \u201cIt kind of looks like a rainbow,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That room is where he assembles the tiny political vignettes he posts online under the name \u2018PoliLego\u2019: major news moments recreated with the plastic minifigures, printed photo backgrounds and, when needed, and sometimes a little paint job on the pop-on Lego hair.<\/p>\n
Recent PoliLego scenes depict astronaut Jeremy Hansen<\/a>, the first Canadian to go to the moon, and Maggie Helwig<\/a>, Toronto author who won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some posts do better than others, Bosch says. For example, his post showing Queen Elizabeth II walking toward the pearly gates \u2014 \u201cyou can see her handbag, her crown\u201d \u2014 received more than 1,500 likes. A more recent Stephen Harper post, depicting the unveiling of his official portrait in Parliament, received about 700.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Bosch did not set out to become Ottawa\u2019s Lego chronicler of political life. Growing up in Calgary, he liked Lego \u201cas much as the next kid,\u201d he says, but never imagined he\u2019d have a dedicated Lego room one day. His real love for Lego came from his children\u00a0\u2014 in particular, his son Ben, who was building complex sets before he could even read.<\/p>\n Around that time, Bosch was working on Parliament Hill for the Liberals, when Justin Trudeau was opposition leader. One of Bosch\u2019s earliest political Lego scenes depicted Trudeau\u2019s charity boxing match against Conservative senator Patrick Brazeau in 2012. Bosch gave the figurine to Trudeau, who displayed it in his office. When Trudeau became prime minister in 2015, Bosch says, he brought the piece with him. \u201cI thought that was quite sweet,\u201d Bosch says.<\/p>\n During the 2015 Canadian federal election, Stephen Harper\u2019s haircut became the subject of online memes. \u201cHe had this helmet hair, like a traditional Lego minifigure,\u201d Bosch says. For a political staffer with a house full of his children\u2019s Lego, the memes sparked Bosch\u2019s imagination.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n In 2016, Bosch reserved the \u2018PoliLego\u2019 handle on Twitter, now X. He began posting regularly, and to date, he\u2019s made around 800 posts, with accounts across Instagram, TikTok and Bluesky.\u00a0<\/p>\n After 19 years on the hill with the Liberals, Bosch still works in politics; in 2021, he was listed as one of the Top 100 lobbyists in Canada by the Hill Times. Today, he\u2019s the co-founder and managing partner of government relations firm, Sandstone Group. \u201cI love politics,\u201d he says. \u201cWith my job, you\u2019re obviously following the news very closely, and you get to know a lot of the politicians on all sides.\u201d<\/p>\n Bosch does not shy away from political commentary. In one scene, a grimacing Donald Trump holds up a \u201851\u2019 sign, a reference to Trump\u2019s repeated comments about Canada becoming the 51st state. Usually, his commentary amounts to what he calls a \u201cgentle ribbing\u201d but says that \u201cDonald Trump might get it worse than most.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Everything that Bosch posts on PoliLego is physically assembled, he says \u2014\u00a0there\u2019s no AI or image editing. He prints photo backgrounds on paper, then builds the Lego scenes in front of them. The toy company\u2019s growing diversity of figures has made the work easier, he says \u2014 but still, the resemblance doesn\u2019t have to be perfect.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey don\u2019t even have noses, for God\u2019s sake,\u201d Bosch says of Lego. \u201cI just have to be approximate, and people are like, \u2018Oh yeah, it looks exactly like that person.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Bosch says people are \u201cgenerally happy to be immortalized as three centimetres tall.\u201d He\u2019ll sometimes give a Lego scene to the person being depicted, especially if they ask \u2014 although he jokes he cannot give away too much Lego, otherwise \u201cI don\u2019t have it to work with anymore.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Bosch\u2019s 800 vignettes have not gone unnoticed. The organizers of Politics and the Pen \u2014 an annual fundraiser and political writing award\u00a0\u2014\u00a0give him the winner\u2019s name a few hours in advance, so he can post their Lego counterpart once the announcement is public.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m well aware I’m playing with dolls,\u201d Bosch jokes \u2014 but in a political world that can often feel hostile, he hopes that PoliLego can bring some fun and whimsy. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of seriousness in the world, there\u2019s a lot of trouble,\u201d he says. \u201cHere\u2019s something where we can all just have a laugh.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 5 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":829398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194295],"tags":[49,48,20739],"class_list":["post-829397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ottawa","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-ottawa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=829397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/829398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=829397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=829397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=829397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}