This article originally appeared in the National Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Christopher Dummitt, June 9, 2026
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.
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.
There is so much wrong with what happened here that it’s hard to know where to start.
There is the small matter of vastly misconstruing the actual history of the RCMP — overlooking anything positive, focusing only on the negative and refusing to acknowledge any shade of grey. There are undoubtedly dark moments in the history of the RCMP and its predecessor, the North-West Mounted Police. But it’s also true that the NWMP was important in protecting Indigenous people on the prairies in the nineteenth century — from fending off American whisky traders to helping combat famine. The force’s history is not uncontroversial, and there is room for criticism. But who needs complexity and nuance in this all-very-funny (take our word for it) spoof-u-mentary?
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