Anyone who makes a regular habit of reading my Quillette columns knows all about the “unmarked graves” social panic that swept Canada in 2021, following claims that the bodies of 215 Indigenous children had been discovered on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. These lurid allegations turned out to be false. Yet despite the passage of half a decade, saying so out loud is still seen as impolite. While mainstream media outlets such as the National Post have admitted that no graves were found, there is a lingering sense that Canadians are duty-bound to pretend those 215 graves are real, lest we undermine the cause of Indigenous “reconciliation.” In some progressive Canadian subcultures, expressing doubt about the graves’ existence is sometimes even stigmatized as a form of “denialism.”

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Canada’s best-known “denialist” is a scholar named Frances Widdowson, who was fired by her university in 2022, after speaking forbidden truths on the unmarked-graves file. In recent months, she’s been talking about the issue on other Canadian campuses, getting herself into more trouble in the process. Her stunts are a little crude (such as walking around with a sandwich board that reads “Zero bodies”). But I do admire her courage.

On May 11, Widdowson posted an 11-minute video to her X feed that demonstrates just how far the anti-“denialist” crowd will go to marginalize and humiliate anyone who speaks plainly about what was and wasn’t found in Kamloops. Widdowson had been invited to appear at a Vancouver studio for an interview about Canadian history. But upon her arrival, the hosts dumped a load of children’s shoes on a coffee table—a visual clue plainly connected to the public memorials that popped up across Canada in 2021, at the height of the unmarked-graves social panic. Widdowson is an odd duck, but she’s no dummy; and she quickly figured out that the whole interview was a set-up intended to humiliate her.

So Widdowson got out her own camera and started directing her own questions to the (fake) docuseries host—an American who presents himself variously as “Mike Smith” and “Michael Bonanno,” but whose real name is Igor Vamos.

Decades ago, Vamos made a name for himself as an avant-garde artist, anti-corporate activist, and prankster. These days, he sheepishly admitted to Widdowson on camera, he’s doing contract work for the Canadian Indigenous media outfit that had lured her to Vancouver.

Whatever the plan was for embarrassing Widdowson in that studio, it failed spectacularly. Smith (understandably) appears embarrassed throughout the entire ordeal, which ends with Widdowson being escorted to a car that will take her back to the airport. The big moment where she’s confronted with the shoes never arrives.

When Widdowson posted the video, she mentioned that the production company Vamos claimed to represent was called Forge Media. That name sounded familiar, so I searched for it in my own records. Sure enough, I found a reference in an email that had been sent to me a few weeks back by one “Pam Gibson.”

She’d emailed me on April 21, lavishing (presumably AI-composed) praise upon my “persistently courageous” journalism, and offering me cash to appear on a “docuseries to reclaim the legacy of [inaugural Canadian prime minister] John A. Macdonald against the recent waves of pushback and [anti-Canadian historical] revisionism.”

Getting a free trip across the country so I could play disc golf with my west coast buddies (and earn cash, to boot) sounded like a sweet deal. But the whole thing also seemed odd and suspicious, so I politely declined. And a good thing I did, or, like Widdowson, I’d likely have found myself sitting there in that same studio, staring at the same pile of footwear while Vamos stumbled through a similarly botched attempt to confront me about my ideologically non-compliant attitudes.

Following the release of Widdowson’s video, other stories about Vamos and his collaborators began appearing online—as it turned out they’d been sending similar solicitations to other Canadian public figures who’d expressed doubts about Kamloops.

“Pam Gibson,” I learned, is actually an American woman named Molly Gore—a self-described “artist and culture jammer working at the intersection of mischief, the imaginal, and social change.” Gore’s previous work includes Total Disaster, which is described thusly in her promotional materials: “Armed with realistic bird puppets, trickster environmental activists pretend to be a giant oil company—staging a satirical press conference to introduce…a plan to rescue animals from the East African Oil Pipeline.”

Gore apparently has retained her fascination with puppets as activist props. In an email to Lindsay Shepherd, another well-known Canadian gadfly with little time for fake news about fake graves, “Pam Gibson” gushes about a “new toy company that’s going to launch a children’s John A. [Macdonald] figurine later this year to celebrate his legacy, and they’d like you to consult on the creation process, and also to serve as the ambassador when it launches!”

“Pam” and her collaborators even sent prototype photos of the “action figure” and “plush talking toy” they were working on. There followed other fake offers from other pseudonymous individuals, including “Michael Smith” (i.e. Vamos), who claimed to run an (equally fake) outfit called “Heritage Figures of Canada.”

These two Americans, Vamos and Gore, seem to have lots of Canadian money to throw around—as their project has been bankrolled by (1) the taxpayer-funded CBC, (2) an Indigenous-run television channel called APTN (also heavily subsidized by taxpayers), and (3) the Indigenous Screen Office, one of the countless cultural-subsidy money troughs run out of the federal government’s Heritage Department. All told, there seems to be at least two dozen (actual) people working on this “docuseries.”

Shepherd—an ink-stained wretch like myself, and a young mother to boot—was understandably drawn to their (apparently) lucrative offers. She discovered that the whole operation was a hoax intended to smear her only once the crew turned on the cameras—a bizarre spectacle that, by her account, involved a shoddy John A. Macdonald impersonator inexplicably babbling about “racial purity.”

I have no idea if this project—referred to variously as Counting Coup and Northland Tales in funding documents—will survive the furore that Widdowson’s counter-sting video footage has set off. It’s hard to predict because the CBC’s editorial standards are always shockingly low when it comes to any project that’s sold to them under the banner of anti-racism or Indigenous empowerment. (Remember, this is the same CBC that once green-lit a show called Lido TV, in which a pair of talking tomatoes delivered woke sermons about colonialism to little children.)

That said, the dishonest nature of this project makes it a special case. And I don’t just mean the literal dishonesty of the show’s producers and hosts, who consistently lied to people in order to lure them into their studio. I also mean the intellectual dishonesty surrounding the show’s marketing. Counting Coup is supposed to be “an unscripted, half-hour comedy series where an Indigenous activist trio uses pranks as a form of social action [to] 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.” But the idea that these are plucky grass-roots pranksters speaking truth to power with a laugh and a wink (a talking point offered by Vamos’ small corps of online defenders in recent days) seems ridiculous given where their money is coming from. As Amy Hamm wrote in the National Post, the whole thing looks like an officially sanctioned top-down taxpayer-funded propaganda exercise aimed at suppressing ideological dissent on the unmarked-graves file.

Though I’m not sure that “dissent” is even the right word: What makes all of this even more strange and excruciating is that in 2025, the CBC itself finally admitted that no unmarked graves had yet been found in Kamloops—a move that presumably came after CBC had given Counting Coup the green light. Since Canada’s state-funded broadcaster has now thereby enlisted itself in the growing ranks of unmarked-graves “denialists,” it would seem that Vamos, Gore, and all their friends would have had grounds to include CBC’s own executive corps in the target list for their puppet-and-shoes shtick.

As director Michael Moore once showed, the prank-film genre works best when the targets are puffed up corporate and political actors—the type of people who are surrounded by a protective cocoon of publicists and security guards. There’s a certain art to gaining their trust and getting them to appear on camera in an unguarded state (not to mention the bonus slapstick scenes where the charade is uncovered and the whole film crew gets unceremoniously thrown out). But this requires skill and a sense of humour, whereas Vamos appears on camera as sour and lifeless. And his targets aren’t powerful plutocrats, but rather somewhat naïve women whom he and Gore lured into a studio with compliments, cash, and lies. Putting journalistic ethics aside, the whole thing is extremely creepy.

Vamos and Gore were able to trick at least one male target, it should be said—an affable 82-year-old retired elementary schoolteacher from Brockville, Ontario named Brian Porter. Unlike the other people I’ve named, Porter is not really a public figure, but just a civic-minded John A. Macdonald history buff who gets invited to local events, where he re-enacts foundational moments in Canadian history while dressed up as Macdonald (with whom he shares a marked resemblance).

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I spoke to Porter on the phone this week, and can attest that he is the furthest thing from a pundit or ideologue. He told me that he was somewhat surprised when Vamos drove up from the United States earlier this year to have coffee with him at a Brockville bakery. During that meeting, “Smith” (as Vamos referred to himself during their interactions) charmed the octogenarian, and fooled him into thinking that he would be featured in a legitimate nationally telecast documentary about Canada’s first prime minister.

But when a Counting Coup crew flew across the country to interview Porter at his Brockville home, it wasn’t “Smith” who led the team, but a woman who called herself “Olivia Goldsmith.”

Porter says that the crew stayed at his house for several hours, talking to him about the legacy of John A. Macdonald. He also reports that Olivia made desultory efforts to steer the conversation toward the Kamloops graves issue, though the topic fizzled quickly.

The whole experience struck him as extremely weird, especially as the crew had inexplicably brought along its own John A. Macdonald re-enactor—the same figure, presumably, who’d speechified to Lindsay Shepherd about “racial purity.” It wasn’t at all clear what role this mascot has in the docuseries production, Porter told me, adding that the man’s costume and demeanour were amateurish and ahistorical.

Then the crew began roaming Porter’s house, taking footage of his historical memorabilia, and lingering on a large John A. Macdonald puppet that Porter had acquired in 2025.

Because pretty much everything that Porter was told by Vamos and “Goldsmith” was a lie, it’s difficult to know what they’ll make of this footage if and when Counting Coup ever comes out. What seems likely is that it will become part of an amateurish non-fiction take on the Best in Show concept, in which Porter is smeared for laughs as a hopelessly backward-looking (and presumably racist) historical obsessive.

If so, it will be interesting to see if the directors inform viewers where Porter’s large John A. Macdonald puppet came from: He purchased it last year from a famed Canadian puppeteer named Noreen Young—a woman best known for creating the CBC children’s television show Under the Umbrella Tree (on which she voiced the puppet character Gloria Gopher).

Young herself died last year at the age of 85. By all accounts, she loved Canada, and took historical figures such as John A. Macdonald seriously—two thoughtcrimes that would have put her in Counting Coup’s cross-hairs. If she were still alive, I’m guessing, her home would have been “Olivia Goldsmith’s” next stop.