A week after the National Police Federation accused the CBC-APTN prank series Northland Tales of deceiving RCMP veterans, a senior CBC executive went looking for the production’s duty-of-care document. She was told it had been lost when files were moved between drives. That’s according to access to information records obtained by Rebel News.
On May 26, Jennifer Dettman, CBC English Services’ executive director of unscripted content, emailed about a “Duty of care info request.” A person whose name is blacked out replied, “RIGHT – will find it now.”
Later that afternoon, the same correspondent wrote: “I think that the document itself got lost in the drive shuffle – it is this one on the clipboard in this picture! I will find it – the migration of the drives has caused me to lose a few links.”
Nine minutes later, Dettman answered: “That is it, thank you.”
The photo isn’t in the release, and the records don’t say what the duty-of-care document contained, who wrote it or when. Most of the thread is blacked out under exemptions for personal information, third-party business information and CBC programming.
The request came one week after National Police Federation president Brian Sauve wrote to Canadian Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller on May 19. Sauve said RCMP veterans and serving members were invited to Vancouver for what they believed was a production honouring their service. He said they arrived in uniform, had their phones taken and were then ambushed on camera.
Sauve asked that the footage never air, warning that broadcasting it “would compound that harm and constitute an ongoing breach of duty of care.” CBC president Marie-Philippe Bouchard forwarded the letter to her senior staff the same evening.
CBC paused production in mid-May. A draft CBC reply to Conservative MP Aaron Gunn in the release says the corporation was pausing the show “while we assess the existing footage.”
On May 25, Gunn raised the RCMP veterans in Question Period and asked whether it was acceptable for the public broadcaster to use taxpayer money to deceive Canadians. Liberal MP David Myles answered that CBC is independent, that production had been paused and that the show had never aired.
CBC public affairs head Chuck Thompson later told someone who had written to Bouchard that CBC was “conducting a comprehensive review of this production.” The records do not say whether that review looked at the duty-of-care document, or what it found.
