As host of the Outdoor Living Network’s extreme job-shadowing series Ed’s Up, Barenaked Ladies guitarist Ed Robertson has done his share of hard labour.

But even though Robertson proved a quick study as a prison guard, a steelworker, and even a tiger trainer, the job that nearly prompted him to call it quits might surprise you.

“Tree planting was the worst,” says Robertson, who capped off a two-day trip to Winnipeg yesterday with some Search and Rescue Technician training at the Canadian Forces’ 17 Wing Winnipeg compound. “I would have a little more understanding of tree planters if they were under watched guard, with rifles pointed at them the whole time. But for eight cents a tree, to plant toilet paper for the lumber companies, f— that.”

Legions of Wolseley-ites might disagree, but we can forgive Robertson the gaffe. When we caught up with him yesterday, he’d spent the last few hours strung up in a parachute simulator, learning how to drop from great heights into God-knows-what danger might be lying below.

“Holy smokes, that was a little bit of a violent release,” Robertson laughed, between pulling his cord and collapsing clumsily next to his simulated victim. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I punched myself in the face that time.”

Robertson’s trip to Winnipeg was for an upcoming episode of Ed’s Up. While training to be a fighter pilot for the military, he also underwent a gruelling fitness test, “got goofy” in a hypobaric chamber that reduced his body’s ability to process oxygen, and made a navigation run in a Dash-8.

For that last one, it helped that Robertson has his pilot’s license — in fact, it’s one of the show’s conceits that he never knows where he’s going next, receiving only GPS co-ordinates in advance.

Shooting on the second season has already taken him to a Texas oil rig, a Louisiana alligator swamp, and an Alberta gold mine, and though Ed’s Up promises to uproot him from his “pampered, rock star existence,” Robertson swears the working life isn’t far removed from his own upbringing.

“I come from pretty blue-collar roots,” he smiles. “I think the show is more about the audience relating to an experience through me, because I’m not really that different from them.”