Bill C-25’s criminal ban on deepfakes won’t restore credible news to the platforms where many Canadians look for it.
A bill before Parliament, C-25 , will amend the Canada Elections Act to target political deepfakes and misinformation in an effort to better protect the integrity of our elections.
Was fake content much of an issue in the last election? Is it still a concern in online debate over things like Alberta or Quebec separation, or support for party leaders?
In the last federal election, deepfakes did play a role. Researchers have traced numerous cross-platform misinformation campaigns to groups that include the extreme right Canada Proud and to actors linked to China and Russia. Some 24 percent of Canadians saw a social media post in which Pierre Poilievre or Mark Carney appeared in fictitious interviews with CBC or CTV News. Many others saw images portraying party leaders as wounded or under arrest, or, in Carney’s case, as tied to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Political deepfakes are now part of our election landscape. Bill C-25 responds by making it an offence to create or distribute an audio or visual deepfake of a candidate or party leader, or material purporting to be from them, with intent to mislead the public. It would also make it an offence to make knowingly false statements about the process or outcome of an election.
There’s certainly a case for making these changes. But Bill C-25 targets only the most visible symptom of a larger problem — not only for our elections but for our democracy as a whole: the dearth of credible news on the platforms most Canadians look for it.
Mar 19, 2026
It’s hard to see how it is
One of the main concerns with the lawful access bill re-tabled in recent weeks (C-22 ) involves a new power to order our cellphone companies to preserve the metadata attaching to all of our calls, emails, and texts for up to a year.
Metadata as defined in the bill captures precisely where and when we used our phones, and the coordinates of who we were in touch with at those times and places — though not the content of our communications.
Even though police would still need a warrant or other authority, such as exigent circumstances, to access this data from Shaw or Telus, the power to order its preservation has raised concerns. Our government is saying here: we’re now going to keep a record of every time you use your phone and where you used it — just in case. But don’t worry. You’re not being watched.
I’ve already had two journalists ask me if this is constitutional. David Fraser has flagged it in his excellent overview of C-22. And Professor Michael Geist has written a very informative and insightful post about this, noting that efforts to pass similar law in Europe have been struck down by the Court of Justice of the EU and by various constitutional courts.
The point of this short post is to explain, in plain terms, how and why this new power might be held to violate our right to privacy under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. (The power appears in section 5(2)(d) of the proposed Supporting Authorized Access to Information Act, found in Part 2 of the bill here .)
Mar 14, 2026
Ottawa is trying again to pass a lawful access bill that would give police quicker access to our personal information.
The Lawful Access Act in Bill C-22 , tabled on Thursday, will also compel big telcos like Shaw and Telus to install equipment to collect and preserve more of our data and give law enforcement more direct access to it.
An earlier version of this bill was contained in Bill C-2, tabled last summer. As you may recall, that also contained new law pertaining to customs and immigration. The lawful access portions were carved out to be dealt with in a separate bill — one that would address the strong criticism of those new powers from various quarters.
The aim of this post is to offer a snapshot of key changes that stand out in C-22. (If it’s of interest, I did a deep dive on Bill C-2’s privacy provisions last summer here .)
My last blog post on this topic, back in December, was titled Five Ways to Fix Bill C-2 . I’m happy to see that C-22 adopts all five of my recommendations — but, unfortunately, not entirely.
Some of the most controversial elements of C-2 have been narrowed in C-22, but others remain largely intact. And there is one new data retention duty, involving our cellphones, that is subtle but could be quite invasive.
Jan 20, 2026
A viral paper sounds the alarm by abandoning nuance
A paper titled “How AI Destroys Institutions” by two Boston University Law professors, posted to SSRN and forthcoming in the UC Law Journal, has gone viral, with around 17,000 downloads. (The other day it was 9.) Papers in law do well if they get over a few hundred hits. This one was aided in part by Gary Marcus, a well-known gen AI skeptic, boosting it on social media, which is how I came across it.
After reading it, I don’t think it’s a cynical attempt to take an extreme position in the hope of going viral. But the paper is so sweeping, so feverish in its claims, that despite my reluctance to draw further attention to it, I feel compelled to comment.
Sometimes articulating a fear — facing it head on — helps us come to terms with it. The authors, Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey, point to real dangers here, across many fronts. But their certainty about the doom that lies ahead, about how serious a threat AI poses, comes at the expense of abandoning all nuance — of assuming that because something is possible in theory, it is likely to occur in practice.
Jan 14, 2026
If we want to reduce harm, we need to look upstream
In December, the federal government tabled the ‘Protecting Victims Act’ (Bill C-16 ) to fill a gap in Canada’s Criminal Code on the distribution of sexual deepfakes, and added a new offence of threatening to distribute an intimate image.
In this post, I ask: how prevalent is this conduct in Canada, and will these new offences make a difference? If not, what more should we do?
Briefly, the Criminal Code already makes it an offence to share an intimate image of an adult without consent, but it doesn’t capture deepfakes. Now it will. And while extortion is already an offence, it requires a threat made “with intent to obtain” something. The bill’s new offence of threatening to distribute an intimate image only requires that a threat be made.
The government has yet to release its Charter Statement, but David Fraser wonders whether the deepfake offence is too broad to survive a freedom of expression challenge. There’s a public interest defence, but does it protect satirical deepfakes of politicians? Should there be broader exceptions for this? Will the courts ‘read in’ these exceptions?
All good questions, but I want to address the conduct targeted here. How prevalent is it and will new law help? Short answer: the conduct is prevalent, but I doubt these new laws — or others on the way — will do much to curb it.