Not everyone thought all of our April Fool’s articles were funny. For example…

Maybe we were a bit excessive posting 5 Fake News articles on April Fool’s Day.

One of them, “Mike Holmes released after loitering charge dropped,” featured a fake news post from John Bleasby (usually a serious journalist), writing about Mike Holmes acting strangely in Northern Saskatchewan, where he allegedly (he did no such thing, of course) was drawing a crowd by pumping his biceps in the front window of a building supply store.

“According to others at the scene, Holmes was muttering to himself about an overdue limousine due to pick him up and take him back to Saskatoon. ‘He was a little wound up when we arrived,’ SPP (Saskatchewan Provincial Police) Constable Cook said.”

(Bleasby is a tricky guy. The SPP disbanded in 1928. The provincial police force of Saskatchewan is, of course, the RCMP.)

Police were quoted as saying, “He kept telling us, ‘I’m Mike Holmes’ and that he was some famous TV contractor or something – kind of like that Brian Bimmler guy we see on the TV sometimes,” said Constable Cook. ‘But we’ve never seen this Holmes fellow before.’ “

Anyway, we all had a good laugh. Almost annually, we make fun of Bryan Baeumler in these April Fool’s Day posts. Bryan’s organization usually sends us a saucy e-mail but never asks us to take them down. We also had some fun at the expense of TV contractor Paul Lafrance this year (about building projects on Mars, but you had to be there, we guess). We hear Paul laughed out loud.

Not so the digital team that works for The World’s Most Trusted Contractor.

Here is an email (with the complainant’s name and firm redacted) we got on April 3 (by that time we had added a disclaimer at the top of the story that it was of course an April Fool’s gag post)…

We DID, as requested, take the offending post down. You have to hand it to the Mike Holmes digital folks. They are looking after his brand!

From: *****@***************.ca”

Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2019 at 1:34 PM
To: Rob Koci <RKoci@canadiancontractor.ca>
Subject: Article about Mike Holmes

Hi Rob,

We do some work for Mike Holmes (building and optimising his website), and I was browsing your website and found this article https://www.canadiancontractor.ca/canadian-contractor/mike-holmes-released-after-loitering-charge-dropped/1003285536/.

What would it take to get this article removed? 🙂

Thank you,

******** ********* | ******** ******** ******** | www.*************.ca
*****@*************.ca
t: ***.***.****