Fake soldier sparks rapid response

By David Studer
Director, Journalistic Standards and Practices, CBC News and Centres

Ottawa police estimated that 50,000 people attended this year's Remembrance Day commemoration at the National War Memorial, a particularly poignant and heartfelt ceremony given what took place there just a few weeks before. 

Among the crowd on that crisp blue Ottawa day, as always on November 11, were many thousands of military and retired military personnel, from all branches of our services, respectfully wearing their various uniforms.

Among them one man, a big man with a tidy beard and a soldierly bearing, was wearing a uniform and decorations to which he had no right. The many military personnel around him appeared to have no idea that those badges and medals weren't ones he'd earned.

CBC News was there, broadcasting extensive live coverage of the War Memorial ceremonies, and our correspondent Diana Swain stopped for a moment to ask someone from the crowd about the meaning of the day. In that crowd of military uniforms she, too, took that big man in the maroon beret for the real thing.

He told CBC viewers what many others were surely thinking, that "it's really important to remember that people have fought for our freedom. They didn't fight for themselves." And he also spoke to a newspaper reporter; "We fought together," he said, "It's brothers."

Noble sentiments, but the man himself would soon prove to be anything but, in the eyes of Canadian soldiers and veterans. Because by the next day, we'd begun to hear from sharp-eyed military personnel: that beret, those badges, the decorations... they weren't up to scratch, weren't quite right... and soldiers from "his" outfit, the Royal Canadian Regiment... they should have recognized him, but didn't.

As soon as we learned about these suspicions, CBC News started an investigation. We didn't want to let stand the false impression his appearance in our coverage had given, and we wanted to establish the truth.

What we soon learned--and quickly reported--was that those suspicions were correct, that the "soldier" was a fake. He'd given his name as Franck Gervais. The Department of National Defence had no-one by that name in their records. Rideau Hall didn't have him listed, either, even though they should have, if his Governor General's Medal of Bravery had been genuine.

As CBC News pursued the story, we learned more. This wasn't Gervais' first appearance in "uniform." In fact, it seems he was married in much the same outfit. CBC staffers in Ottawa pursued the story through the day, reporting as they went.

Every journalist worries that the day will come when they meet up with a Franck Gervais, someone whose plausibility is--at least in part--based on how unlikely it is that anyone would go to such lengths to "become" someone they aren't.

Normally, when journalists look for informal comments from members of the public -- reporters call them "streeters" -- they don't ask people to prove who they are. So once in a blue moon, they will encounter a Franck Gervais in a situation where our reporter is on air during a live broadcast.

At CBC News we want our reporters to keep talking to members of the public, as they've always done. We believe that when these things happen, it's our job to explain where things went awry... and then to report on the rest of the story.