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 some mainstream media outlets such as the National Post have admitted that no graves were found, there is a lingering sense that Canadians must pretend those 215 graves are real, lest we undermine the cause of Indigenous “reconciliation.” In some progressive Canadian subcultures, refusing to express faith in 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 this 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 cue plainly connected to the public memorials that popped up across Canada in 2021, at the height of the unmarked-graves hysteria. Widdowson is an odd duck, but she’s no dummy; and so quickly figured out that the whole thing 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 attacking Widdowson in that studio, it failed spectacularly. Smith (understandably) appears embarrassed throughout the entire ordeal, which ends with Widdowson being escorted to the 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 a message that had been sent 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 in that same Vancouver studio, staring at a pile of footwear while Vamos stumbled through a similarly botched attempt to confront me about my ideologically non-compliant attitudes.

Soon, 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 the original Kamloops narrative.

“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” gushed 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 said he ran 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 efforts are 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 project.

Shepherd—an ink-stained wretch like myself, and a young mother to boot—was understandably drawn to these 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 set off. It’s hard to predict because the CBC’s editorial standards are always shockingly low when it comes to any project marketed under the banner of anti-racism or Indigenous empowerment. Remember, this is the same CBC that green-lit a 2022 show called Lido TV, in which a pair of talking testicle-shaped tomatoes delivered woke sermons about colonialism to little children.

That said, the dishonest nature of Counting Coup 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 conceit that these are plucky grass-roots pranksters speaking truth to power with a grin 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.

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 and Gore have grounds to include CBC’s own executive corps on their target list.

As director Michael Moore once showed, the prank-film genre works best when the targets are puffed up corporate and political figures—the type of people who are surrounded by a protective cocoon of publicists and security guards. There’s a certain art to gaining the trust of this sort of person, and getting him or her to appear on camera in an unguarded state. But doing this right requires skill and a sense of humour, whereas Vamos appears on camera as sour and lifeless. And his victims aren’t powerful plutocrats. The targets whom he and Gore succeeded in tricking were trusting women lured with compliments, cash, and lies. Putting journalistic ethics aside, the whole project is just plain creepy.

Vamos and Gore were able to snare 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 others 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.”