Scams, Swindlers and School Board Meetings
Three tariff-free series out of Canada that I'm listening to this week to avoid the news
News avoidance has become a transitive verb for me. Truthfully, I’m not very successful, but in the meantime, I’ve discovered three different Canadian series to keep me occupied and focus on different things. And since the tariffs might come into effect next week, I feel obliged to remind you these are all publicly available, and now paywall free.
Queries
From TVOntario
This series follows some of the recent trends in the media: discrimination, 2SLGBTIQ+ rights, religious freedoms…and the perceived right of male leadership to say outrageous things in official meetings, apparently just to make a point, not because he meant it. Reminder: it’s still lawful to complain about equity, inclusion and rights, even in formal settings.
Public school board meetings; technically anyone can go, but few do. These meetings are usually procedural and very long; but they’re also where big and and small important decisions are made (if, slowly).
In 2019, a Toronto Catholic District School Board Meeting was convened to address the fact that the Ontario Government had set a deadline for Boards to change their Code of Conduct Policies to align with The Ontario Human Rights Code. And this Board was past the deadline to add four new categories of people that would be protected from discrimination into their school code of conduct.
Those terms were:
Gender identity
Gender expression
Marital status
Family Status
Almost five hours into this conentious meeting, a Trustee name Mike Del Grande stood up and said something outrageous. If these four categories should be included, he argued, then they must also consider many other categories. He then spends five minutes listing off a range of criminal and fetishist behaviours. “Jesus loves all these people,” he concludes. His list included pedophiles, cannibals, vampire, flesh eating, bestiality…his audacious list went on, and on.
The issue blew up in the press. Trustee Del Grande skulked away and told the press “Just joking!” The spokesperson dispatched to speak to the podcast in his stead wanted everyone to know that he was using a debating technique called “rhetorical hyperbole,” as he worked to defend what he saw as an attack on his Catholic values.
This short series (4 episodes) takes you inside the fight of Kyle Iannuzzi, a former student school board trustee, who was at this meeting. They filed a complaint to the school board, and later with the Ontario Governement, about Trustee Del Grande’s remarks. Iannuzzi wanted a safe space for all students, like him. And they forced the discussion about where the limits of safety, diversity and inclusion lie, with a Catholic school board, with or without the opinion of God.
The Con: Kaitlyn’s Baby
From A Co-Production with CBC and BBC
Having done this a few times already, the idea of faking pregnancy and labour seems utterly ludicrous to me. The outcome is great (kids), but the process to get there (morning sickness, painful delivery, complications…) doesn’t seem to me a reasonable elective sport.
Unless of course you have “factitious disorder,” a rare personality disorder where you fake illness, usually to get attention. And in the case of this woman Kaitlyn, who hails from a small town in Southern Ontario, you fake a pregnancy, and then a very long and drawn out labouring process, to a doula—a birthing coach that helps women through a pregnancy and labour.
During the pandemic, where this story kicks off, some doulas offered birth coaching as a virtual service (some labours can last 24-48 hours, so many health practitioners work virtually). In addition, a doula isn’t licensed to actually birth a baby, that job is for a midwife or a doctor, so they remain in the unregulated shadows of support workers, and more suspectible to scams.
What makes for a good fake, in the world of fake pregnancy, is a traumatic and outrageous claim about how you got pregnant in the first place (so, rape or incest are two indicators). And then of course the end of the story must be tragic…a stillborn baby is just about the only option to go with, as you don’t actually have a baby in the end. The various stories that Kaitlyn shared with her doula victims knew no boundaries. You can imagine how a green-eared doula could get sucked into a scam, while trying hard to be caring and compassionate to their client, without realizing they had been had.
A doula is there to help support and coach a woman through any crisis, and Kaitlyn was evidently a very persuasive con artist, which meant that dozens and dozens of doulas fell for this before she was finally arrested, charged, and faced jail time. This is also the story of how Facebook and TikTok became a community news bureau that brought a group of doulas together to share stories and warn each other of these abuses.
This series took me to a place I wasn’t sure I could get to. It managed to treat many of the delicate details with a straightforward honesty, and allowed just enough sensationalism before it tipped toward truly bawdy details. It’s a pregnancy thriller that ends with justice.
Sea of Lies
From the CBC series Uncover
Of the many true crime channels, Uncover, from CBC, might be one of the only ones that’s pulls this off seasonal changes without looking like it’s the next chapter in a poorly managed, rushed-to-market franchise. Sea of Lies is Season 32 of Uncover…Season 1 began in 2018 with the seminal Escaping NXIVM.
Sea of Lies tells the story of an unlikely discovery: a dead body shows up in the fishing catch ten miles off shore, near Devon, England. “Someone who was never supposed to be found,” host Sam Mullins tells us, while convincing with this tongue firmly planted in cheek that this story is “a miracle.”
Sea of Lies has a rollicking meter to it. Humour, timing and delivery all come together like a multicoloured polkadot outfit to tell this story. The story is unfurled by Mullins, one of the best narration writers working now. His series Lost Boys (Campside Media), is about two boys who showed up in a BC town with a story that they had been raised with very little human contact, in a remote location in the woods. It’s the sort of giddy hippie origin story that made this small pre-Internet town rally around them…until they were discovered to be runaway fakes.
In Sea of Lies, Mullins is able to stretch his legs into a strange and audacious story that exists on the level of international (almost) espionage, luck, and a fisherman father and at-home-for-the-summer university-aged son who flinch, but eventually make the right choice to call the police.
You will enjoy this ride with Mullins, from England, back to Canada, over to France and a few consequential door knocking stops along the way. His straightman delivery made me laugh every third sentence.
How did Albert Walker become one of the most wanted men in the world? The story begins in a small town in Ontario called Orangeville, which has nothing to do with the fruit.