Margareta Dovgal: The public broadcaster has no business trying to humiliate Canadians

Using taxpayer money to lie and deceive for viral content is an egregious violation by the CBC.

(The team behind the fake documentary, from Lindsay Shepherd’s X account.)

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has confirmed its involvement in what can only be described as a taxpayer-funded deception operation targeting Frances Widdowson and Lindsay Shepherd. It involved months of building rapport under false pretences, fake production companies, and staged interviews, all to produce some glorified “gotcha” moments, in a style similar to Borat.

The CBC operation reportedly ran through sham entities including “Forge Media” and, in Shepherd’s account, “Heritage Figures Canada”, with targets drawn through meetings, paperwork, and studio bookings under the guise of a documentary project.

In Widdowson’s case, the process reportedly ended in a Vancouver CBC studio, where what was presented as a serious interview gave way to a theatrical confrontation built around children’s shoes.

It could not, under any scenario, be described as ‘journalism’. Rather, it is best characterised as left-wing activist theatre being subsidised by the Canadian public.

In this country, our national broadcaster is funded by taking money from every taxpayer. Some within it have decided certain interpretations of residential school history and Sir John A. Macdonald’s legacy are not to be debated, as though its members were high priests of the federation.

People are allowed to ask questions, and that does not merit public humiliation, nor do Shepherd and Widdowson’s inquiries provide any basis for a full-scale documentary in pursuit of those ends. Shepherd has further alleged that, while signing a release form, one of the producers tried to distract her from reading it closely. This only makes the entire affair look more like a premeditated trap than legitimate broadcasting.

Public institutions in Canada are supposed to serve serious, pluralistic debate. When elements of the public broadcaster treat dissenting citizens as subjects of an ambush “comedy” troupe, it has failed in its mandate.

One of the great justifications laid out for the CBC’s existence is that we need a Canada-wide broadcaster to support national unity. This is at odds with the denigration and mockery of the Fathers of Confederation that are often present on the network.

Furthermore, who signed up to fund the attempted humiliation of Shepherd and others? Public funds should not extend to such chicanery, intended to narrow the range of acceptable thought.

It does not help Canada’s long-running struggles with institutional trust. Whether it is vaccine mandates or politicised human rights tribunals, public institutions have not served as a tool of the common good.

In the enlightened view of media gatekeepers, some questions are too dangerous to be asked openly. Among the questions asked by the two women, so far as we are presently aware, are these: how many children died and were buried at the Kamloops residential school? How should we tell the story of Sir John A. Macdonald?

Canada’s integrity as a nation relies on handling these conversations honestly. We cannot afford to allow thinly veiled blood libels to be hurled at the Canadian people, and then have the parameters of their own rebuttals constrained. Shepherd, Widdowson, and others deserve a fair hearing.

Normal Canadians, who pay the bills and expect their institutions to serve the country rather than anti-Canadian ideological factions, are, at the very least, entitled by now to feel a quiet civic disgust.

This is not a partisan issue, or at least it should not be. The fake documentary team is treating scepticism, as is normal in a liberal society, as a disruption to its narrative script.

Most egregiously, it is doing so with money extracted from the very people whose views it seeks to marginalise.

What are normal people prepared to tolerate any more? How many staged ambushes, how much ideological capture disguised as edgy content, and to what degree will the public square be dissolved before we demand that institutions fulfil their proper role?

Institutions die when the people who depend on them allow them to decay. Right now, the CBC is testing exactly how much erosion the Canadian public is willing to underwrite.

The ball is in our court, not theirs.

Margareta Dovgal is a public policy commentator specializing in energy, climate, and economic development. She holds a Master’s of Public Administration in Energy, Technology and Climate Policy from University College London, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Asian Area Studies from the University of British Columbia, where she also studied Sanskrit, archaeology, and philosophy.