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Christopher Dummitt: There’s nothing funny about ambushing RCMP veterans

The Northland Tales scandal reveals how “punching up” has become little more than taxpayer-funded bullying

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By now, you probably know about the government-funded show Northland Tales, that misrepresented itself to get conservative figures like Frances Widdowson and Lindsay Shepherd to appear on tape. The producers pretended to admire the women’s work and claimed to want to highlight their voices, only to turn around and attack them on camera. There is also the not-incidental matter that almost nothing the unaired shows’ producers have allegedly done so far appears to be funny. But we are talking about CBC comedy in the 2020s, after all.

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The most recent allegation, though, is the grimmest one yet: that the show reportedly invited up to five retired RCMP officers to a studio under the guise of honouring them for their service. But once they arrived at a Vancouver studio, everything changed. According to those accounts, the production team took away the veterans’ phones and put them in front of a TV audience. The premise of commemorating their service vanished. Instead, the retirees faced a Chinese-Cultural-Revolution-style struggle session in which they were made to answer for the alleged evils of the RCMP and its history.

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