WARMINGTON: Interviews on Sir John A. Macdonald were Borat-style gotcha gag

· Toronto Sun

The only thing real in this sneak undercover television production was that the unsuspecting questioners of Canada’s Indigenous residential school grave narrative were being pranked.

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And lured to Vancouver on the false and manufactured premise to talk about the virtues of the first Prime Minister of Canada Sir John Macdonald.

It turns out it was a trap — like something out of the Borat movie.

“I was deceived by social activists in an elaborate scheme,” said journalist, author and famous anti-pronoun activist Lindsay Shepherd, who last year, while pregnant, was fired from her political job for a tweet about Truth and Reconciliation Day. “A production group with what I now know has a fake name and fake identities gave me a friendly interview about my book A Day with Sir John A , and about Sir John A Macdonald.”

That was designed to lure her into their fishing hole and then set the hook.

“In a second filmed interview last week, they turned on me, and it was revealed to have all been a setup in order to demonize Sir John A and smear me. It turns out this is a taxpayer-funded CBC and APTN project,” Shepherd posted to her X account Tuesday.

It all seemed so real. It was not. It was a gotcha moment. But it was done patiently, with skill and hugely funded with many co-conspirators. This was an elaborate, well-thought-out ruse.

Fake show and fake production company

“They connected me with a fake company called Heritage Figures Canada with a fake website and hired me to perform consulting work for them,” Shepherd wrote. “We had what I now know were fake meetings, fake documents, fake commercial shoot, fake prototype of a Sir John A collectible.”

Then a teaching assistant, Sheppard, who in 2017 made public a tape of her professors scolding her for simply hosting a debate in her Sir Wilfrid Laurier University class on the pronoun madness, was not the only big fish they tried to hook.

Toronto Conservative candidate for federal parliament in 2021 Mark Johnson , who leads the Save Our History group that has been trying to get Sir John A. Macdonald statues back up across Canada, was also enticed but didn’t bite.

He shared emails which highlight the duplicity and obfuscation. From Forge Media, Johnson received one that said “my name is Pam Gibson. I’m a producer working on a docuseries about Canadian historical memory — specifically, the growing movement to reclaim Canada’s heritage and founding values against this current wave of pushback. I’m casting for an episode featuring those at the front of the fight to defend John A. Macdonald’s legacy, and we were referred to you as someone doing some of the most important, brave, and impactful work there.”

She added, “we’d like to invite you to film an interview in Vancouver between April 30-May 1 (all travel and expenses covered by the production).”

Johnson smelled a rat: “They even set up a fake production company, complete with a very nice, legitimate website.”

He was suspicious. He was right to be.

“ForgeMediaTV.com is now offline,” Johnson said.

Legendary writer Jerry Amernic, whose Amazon best-selling book Sleepwoking has a chapter on Sir John Macdonald and covers “revisionist history,” said he flew to Vancouver to do an interview and was paid in cash. Saying he now knows he was “deceived,” he is “very upset about it” and is “considering what to do about it” including writing an “essay” on what transpired there.

The gig is up and cat is out of the bag for this production.

A big part of the reason for that is because Dr. Frances Widdowson, a former professor at Calgary’s Mount Royal University who has been suspicious of the claims of 215 buried children at the Kamloops Residential School, also took the bait and ended up in the television studio.

Professor turned tables on the tricksters

But she also spit the hook back in their faces.

When they decided to turn the tables on her by dumping a pile of shoes on a table, representing those who they claim was buried at Residential School sites, Widdowson turned the camera on them.

They were so busted.

As her video posted to X shows, a man saying he was from Missouri claiming to be “Mike Smith” admitted that the whole thing was a gag and that he was working for Aboriginal people to produce a candid-camera-style television show.

“Who are you?” Widdowson asked. “This seems to be a set-up of some outfit that’s doing a reality television show that wants to paint me as some sort of racist, they are going to post on social media.”

“You got it exactly right,” Smith said. “This is a social experiment. It’s on video. You figured it out and now we can wrap it up.”

Said Widdowson: “I am the target?”

“You are not a target. You are participating,” Smith said.

“What am I participating in?” she asked.

“A social experiment,” he said.

“What is the social experiment?” the professor asked.

“You just experienced it? You can tell me.”

The CBC and ATPN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network) have been caught in a scandal. Did they know the lengths this operation went to mislead?

CBC admits they are involved in this

“I can confirm that this project is in early production for CBC Entertainment and APTN. No details pertaining to its exhibition are confirmed at this time,” said Leon Mar, Senior Director, Public Affairs and Corporate Spokesperson, said in an emailed response to the Sun , adding that this was the project of “independent producers, NLT1 Productions” of Saskatchewan.

They, along with 27 other productions, according to a April 10, 2025 news release, were included in the Indigenous Screen Office (ISO) announcing “$6,300,000 investment in Indigenous productions through the Production stream of the Story Fund Program” in which “ISO supported $750,000 through the Sector Development program to support production and training costs for North of North, a CBC/APTN/Netflix original series.”

Some believe the show will be called Canada Day Surprise, but a news release from ISO describes producing “an unscripted, half-hour comedy series where an Indigenous activist trio uses pranks as a form of social action” and “with outrageous humor, they flip the script on modern and historical injustices against Indigenous peoples, offering a fresh, timely perspective on the prank genre, akin to shows like Borat and The Yes Men .”

The people they were interacting with were the butt of the joke. But not in on the joke.

Made-up names, a phantom production company, a false narrative and effort to dupe conservative-style pundits into saying something on camera that could be ridiculed or laughed at.

This, however, was a sting operation where the clandestine production company got stung.

And Canadian taxpayers may very well have footed the whole bill.

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