Nobody noticed that servers crashed at the E-Comm 9-1-1 call centre for more than two hours because of a missed email.
The server room at the East Vancouver facility, which also houses City of Vancouver’s primary data centre, suffered a chiller failure at 2:07 a.m. on March 16 due to a faulty temperature sensor, according to the incident report obtained by theBreaker.news under the freedom of information law.
E-Comm technician at headquarters (E-Comm 9-1-1).
The backup system failed to activate, exacerbating the situation, said E-Comm’s facilities manager in an email to senior executives.
“We received a critical alarm email for ‘Ecomm, Chiller1’ at 2:07 a.m.” wrote Verin Jekkal. “Unfortunately it was missed due to its classification as a single-chime email.”
The result was lost response time to both the chiller failure and the 4 a.m. systems outage.
Not until 6:15 a.m. did anyone notice.
That is when a technical specialist from the city checked his e-mail and saw the alert notifications. He immediately called his manager, Francis Tan, and key colleagues.
“At about 6:30 a.m. Francis contacted [Jekkal] which was when E-Comm was first advised of the issue,” wrote Kyle Foster, the city’s director of infrastructure and operations, in the city’s incident report.
“None of these alerts were configured to be sent via text or phone call, nor are they monitored by a 24×7 service; they went unnoticed.”
City and E-Comm staff arrived on-site to begin recovery at 7 a.m. They opened the data centre doors and set-up large fans outside the rooms to disperse the heat, which reached a sweltering 57 degrees Celsius.
Technicians from ventilation and air conditioning contractor Trane arrived at 8 a.m. and both primary and backup chillers were operational by 8:40 a.m. It was cool enough to power equipment back-up by 9:30 a.m.
E-Comm 9-1-1 headquarters (E-Comm 9-1-1).
While 9-1-1 continued to function, emergency call-takers and dispatchers used paper instead of computer-aided dispatch systems and white boards instead of screens. Except for an early slowdown, their ability to take calls was not impacted. They could not, however, access the B.C. and federal police reporting databases.
The outage affected anyone trying to use the city website or Van311 app between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. and the city’s 3-1-1 non-emergency hotline between 7 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. It also impacted the 400 staff, mainly firefighters and community centre workers, on shift that morning.
Technicians rebooted the server at 12:30 p.m. on March 17 and rebooted and restarted multiple servers and monitored all applications for recovery throughout March 18.
Foster’s report called it a high severity incident that would only have been worse had the outage occurred on a weekday. He found deficiencies in dashboard monitoring, internal staff and external partner contact details, incident reporting, response and communication procedures.
On the positive side of the ledger, e-mail, Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint Online remained accessible due to those being cloud-based programs. City workers also had the benefit of a recent three-day business continuity plan exercise.
Internal E-Comm communication suggested an initial concern that the data centre could have been hacked. But a spokesperson for the company said that scenario was ruled out.
“The cooling system failure was triggered by a technical problem, a fault in an electrical component of the main cooling system, and not malicious interference,” said E-Comm communications manager Carly Paice. “Next steps include the completion of a full post-incident assessment of the outage that is still underway, and incorporating lessons learned into ongoing work to strengthen technology resiliency.”
YouTube’s parent company says it is taking action to stop deepfake ads that portray Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland flogging a get rich quick scheme.
Liberal Finance Minister in deepfake videos seen on YouTube (YouTube)
theBreaker.news reported June 11 about the ads, found inadvertently May 31 on YouTube. The clips show Freeland, who is also the Deputy Prime Minister to Justin Trudeau, in ads that are packaged as reports on TV news channels. But they were generated by artificial intelligence (AI). A spokesperson for Freeland called the videos, and associated websites, fake and rife with false and misleading information. (SEE THE DEEPFAKE CLIPS BELOW.)
A Google spokesperson, citing company policy, provided comment on condition of anonymity.
“Protecting our users is our top priority and we have strict policies that govern the ads and content on our platform,” said the Google statement. “These scams are prohibited and we are terminating the ads accounts and channels behind them. We are investing heavily in our detection and enforcement against scam ads that impersonate public figures and the bad actors behind them.”
The source video for one of the Freeland clips was an April 7 Toronto news conference where she ironically announced $2.4 billion taxpayer funding to boost Canada’s AI sector. Last November, Google agreed to pay $100 million a year, plus inflation, to Canadian media outlets in order to be exempt from the Liberal government’s Online News Act. The controversial law is also known as a tax on web links.
Google says it has long-prohibited the use of deepfakes and other forms of doctored content that aim to deceive, defraud or mislead users about political issues. It requires user verification and employs human reviewers and machine learning to monitor and enforce polices. Of the 5.5 billion ads it removed last year, 206.5 million contravened the company’s misrepresentation policy. It also suspended more than 12.7 million advertiser accounts.
Mac Boucher, an AI content generation expert and partner in L.A.-based KNGMKR, spoke June 12 at the Trace Foundation and Vancouver Anti-Corruption Institute’s Journalism Under Siege conference in Vancouver.
Boucher showed a reel of deepfake videos made with the images and audio clips of celebrities such as Christopher Walken and Morgan Freeman. He cited the popular PlayHT program as an example.
“You feed it a video file or an audio file that I just rip off the internet. It takes a second to process and sometimes it messes up,” Boucher said. “But, then essentially, you have a TTS model, which is text-to-speech, where you can type anything you want, you can add sentiment to it, happy, sad, fearful, surprised, etc. It will start to be able to generate, oftentimes pretty bad generations, but it takes a little bit of tuning and tweaking and editing to make it come out a lot more naturally.”
Boucher, the brother of musician Grimes, said AI is cheap to produce. Disinformation is the drawback, but that is most effective when “people no longer believe in a system that is not really working in their best interests, or at the appearance that is in their best interests.”
“The internet is probably just going to look a lot like Times Square as of right now, which is not really a place that people spend a lot of time. It just attracts tons of tourists and people just passing through,” Boucher said.”Then there’s going to be small neighbourhoods that have standards of excellence for whatever the data.”
Mac Boucher (LinkedIn)
Some governments are slowly pondering regulation of the fast-evolving technology. California state senator Bill Dodd tabled the AI Accountability Act to regulate AI use by state agencies, including transparency of its use and push for state-funded AI education.
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC) warned in a March bulletin that deepfakes use“machine-learning algorithms to create realistic-looking fake videos or audio recordings. This is most commonly seen in investment and merchandise frauds where fake celebrity endorsements and fake news are used to promote the fraudulent offers.”
In May, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission proposed a $6 million fine for political consultant Steve Kramer who was behind robocalls two days prior to the first-in-the-nation presidential primary in New Hampshire. Those robocalls featured deepfake audio using President Joe Biden’s voice to encourage citizens to abstain from the primary and save their vote for the November presidential election.
Kramer was also arrested in New Hampshire on bribery, intimidation and voter suppression charges.
Toronto-based Marcus Kolga of DisinfoWatch.org is concerned that the technology is advancing so rapidly that deepfake videos could become undetectable and ultimately be used by bad actors to cause financial manipulation and geopolitical disruption on a mass-scale.
“This technology is only improving and it’s improving not yearly, it’s improving every month,” Kolga said.
More than two years after FIFA named Vancouver’s B.C. Place Stadium one of 16 North American sites of the 2026 World Cup, B.C. Pavilion Corporation (PavCo) has finally revealed the contract that has triggered nearly $600 million in costs for taxpayers.
PavCo, the Crown corporation that operates B.C. Place , had previously released 120, almost totally greyed-out pages after this reporter’s April 2022 freedom of information request.
FIFA’s 2026 World Cup logo (FIFA)
On June 21, in response to this reporter’s appeal to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, PavCo released a partially censored version of the 96-page stadium agreement and appendices.
The contract was agreed with FIFA’s domestic subsidiary, the Canadian Soccer Association, in advance of 2022’s host city awards. While it contains a confidentiality clause, there is a requirement for both sides to adhere to “relevant laws or court orders.” That would include B.C.’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Judges and adjudicators have consistently ruled in favour of disclosure of negotiated contracts between public bodies and private entities.
The PavCo version appears substantially the same as FIFA’s stadium agreements previously released by other cities, such as Seattle, Toronto and Santa Clara, Calif. But PavCo is still withholding several key clauses, a letter from PavCo CEO Ken Cretney and a questionnaire.
PavCo, the subsidiary of NDPer Lana Popham’s Ministry of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport, claims certain information is protected from disclosure because it constitutes recommendations and advice, and/or potential harm to intergovernmental relations, public body finances and third-party business operations.
Meanwhile, City of Vancouver continues to withhold the host city contract, which is under appeal this summer.
What it says
Vancouver was allotted seven matches between June 13 and July 7, 2026. Two of them will feature the Canadian national team. The stadium agreement gives FIFA full control of what goes on inside and outside B.C. Place from 30 days before the first match to seven days after the last — a two-month period. But infrastructure for food, beverage, hospitality, media, ticketing and technology may show up well before and remain well after that period.
“The stadium authority shall make available, at no costs… all relevant areas and/or facilities at the stadium for any such set-up, installation and preparation work to be done at the stadium as of three months prior to the day of the opening match until two months after the day of completion of the last match staged at the stadium,” the agreement states.
Operational costs and expenses incurred by PavCo “shall be entirely compensated by the payment of the stadium rental fee.” FIFA will not bear the cost of electricity or water, nor will it pay for permanent or temporary equipment, facilities, infrastructure and further engineering systems, such as power supply, elevators, safety systems or access to utilities.
PavCo faces a June 30, 2025 deadline to complete all renovation or construction work. Popham said on April 30 that stadium renovations and tournament operations would cost taxpayers $149 million to $196 million. Works include the installation of a natural grass pitch, upgrades to team dressing rooms and public washrooms, new, larger elevators, a new in-house broadcast facility, improved wifi and a new central video scoreboard.
Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim (left), NDP B.C. sport minister Lana Popham and Liberal sport minister Carla Qualtrough (BC Gov)
The grass playing field must be no less than 125 metres by 85 metres, but FIFA will decide which species of grass will be installed.
There must be two independent sources of power supply and an emergency power system so that “power failure shall not lead to the cancellation or postponement of a match.”
PavCo was required to buy, at its own expense, insurance coverage no later than two years prior to the opening match. FIFA has the power to postpone, relocate, abandon or cancel any World Cup match or the whole tournament. Should any of that happen, BC Place is not entitled to receive any compensation.
B.C. Place must also stage, in conjunction with the CSA, at least three soccer matches in full-stadium format as test events prior to 2026. FIFA has the “non-exclusive right to have free and unrestricted access to visit and inspect the stadium” at no cost, at any time.
Rent stays secret
Detailed seating plans for the seven matches were due by May 31, 2024 “for the entire seating inventory in the stadium, including any permanent and temporary seating, the installation of the VIP tribune, the media tribune or other installations which may affect the seat data.”
PavCo is entitled to “purchase a certain number of tickets for the matches in the stadium (in an amount to be determined by FIFA at a later stage) prior to making such tickets available for sale to the general public.” It cannot use such tickets for commercial purposes, including contest giveaways, without FIFA’s prior written consent.
The agreement contains a clause for the stadium rental fee, but PavCo has withheld the rate sheet it provided to FIFA.
Seattle’s stadium agreement said the basic cost, per match day, at Lumen Field is only US$20,313. But a slew of additional costs for facility management, security, safety, cleaning and waste labour pushed the total over US$1.27 million.
FIFA has the right, under the agreement, to assume and/or appoint a third party to take over PavCo’s obligations, should PavCo “not be fully or partially complying.”
When Vancouver was chosen to be one of the 16 host cities in June 2022, the provincial government estimated taxpayers would be on the hook for $240 million to $260 million.
The cost of hosting has skyrocketed to between $483 million and $581 million — or $69 million to $83 million per match day. Popham blamed inflation and FIFA’s requirements, including the expansion of the 48-nation tournament in Canada, Mexico and U.S. from 80 to 104 matches.
The new, $104 million PNE Amphitheatre, to open in 2026, will be the centrepiece of the FIFA Fan Festival at Hastings Park. It will not be allowed to use the Freedom Mobile name during the World Cup, however, due to FIFA sponsorship rules. Training sites at Killarney, Strathcona, Empire and Jericho parks are to be confirmed.
READ the stadium agreement (obtained by theBreaker.news via FOI) below.
April Hutchinson is a Canadian champion powerlifter and advocate for keeping women’s sport for women.
Hutchinson was at the B.C. Legislature in Victoria in April when Conservative leader John Rustad tabled the Fairness in Women’s and Girls’ Sports bill. But Premier David Eby’s NDP majority blocked the private member’s bill before it could be debated.
It is an issue of health, safety and fairness, Hutchinson says. She is not alone. Tennis legend Martina Navratilova and Alberta track and field coach Linda Blade (who was a guest on this podcast) have also campaigned for rules against biological male athletes competing in women’s sport.
Listen to host Bob Mackin’s interview with April Hutchinson.
Plus, this week’s Pacific Rim and Pacific Northwest headlines.
That is perfectly legal, according to B.C.’s election laws. A third-party advertiser is not required to register and report who they are until July 23. The provincial election is Oct. 19.
According to its Societies Act registration dated March 12, three people are directors of the Project for a Strong B.C. Association: David John Andrew Porteus (sic) of West Kelowna, Samuel Aaron Schechter of New Westminster and Elaine Adele Willis, Duncan.
The society’s registered office is the Richmond law firm of Kahn Zack Ehrlich Lithwick.
The constitution is all of a vague two lines: “The purposes of the Society are: publicly advocate for a stronger British Columbia for everyone and undertake campaigns in support of this advocacy.”
David Porteous is a former NDP-appointee to the Okanagan College board of governors. Willis has a background as a schoolteacher and B.C. Teachers Federation activist.
Schechter is a former North Vancouver city councillor, a protege of former NDP president and North Vancouver city councillor Craig Keating, and a communications instructor at Douglas College in New Westminster.
He did not respond to interview requests. Instead, an Alberta-based representative of an Ottawa-headquartered public relations firm did. Megana Ramaswami, senior strategist with Emdash Agency, did not answer any questions about the amount of funding or source of funding for the ad, which is a movie trailer-themed recap of Conservative leader John Rustad and BC United leader Kevin Falcon’s past as cabinet ministers in the BC Liberal government of Christy Clark.
A 30-second radio ad attacks Eby for not doing enough to combat the rise of post-Oct. 7 antisemitism. It includes a clip of Jewish MLA Selina Robinson, who resigned from the NDP caucus, and finishes with a male voice-over: “Is it going to take a tragedy for Eby and his radical NDP to wake up?”
Brad Zubyk, a political strategist and lobbyist who formerly worked with the NDP and BC Liberals, said he is behind it.
“I threw in the initial money and friends have chipped in but it’s not a big money effort. Four of us are producing content,” Zubyk said.
Zubyk said he contributed the first $15,000 and hopes to raise as much as $50,000.
“It’s not corporate, just my friend group that want to make a difference,” Zubyk said. “I’m not going to disclose the volunteers but I have reached out to friends with some online skills but it is my idea.”
Eby unofficially launches his re-election campaign on June 20 during the noon hour at the Scottish Cultural Centre in Marpole, showcasing four candidates: Sunita Dhir (Vancouver-Langara), Baltej Dhillon (Surrey-Serpentine River), Randene Neil (Powell River-Sunshine Coast) and Michael Moses (Cariboo-Chilcotin).
One of the highest-paid public officials in the Lower Mainland last year, costing taxpayers almost $350,000, was the former mayor of New Westminster.
Ex-New Westminster Mayor Jonathan X. Cote (X/Cote)
Metro Vancouver paid Jonathan Cote $237,303 in salary, expenses and taxable benefits in 2023 as the regional district’s deputy general manager of regional planning and housing development.
New Westminster’s statement of financial information for 2023 shows the Royal City’s mayor from 2014 to 2022 also received $106,443 under the civic “transitional allowance” scheme.
Under a 2010 policy, politicians in New Westminster are entitled to 10% of their annual pay for each year of service from 2008 onwards, up to 12 years. Cote, paid $116,860 in his final year as mayor, spent nine years as a city councillor from 2009 to 2014 before winning the top job. He retired in 2022 instead of running for a third term.
By comparison, Premier David Eby’s annual pay is $227,111.
Last October, a majority of city councillors defeated a motion by New West Progressives’ Coun. Daniel Fontaine to end double-dipping. Fontaine wanted the entitlement cancelled if a former council member got a new job within a year of leaving office. Coun. Paul Minhas, the other New West Progressive, said he will make a second attempt to change the policy.
“In New Westminster, our taxpayers had a hike of 14% in two years,” Minhas said. “We need to prioritize the allocation of resources towards pressing needs, such as infrastructure, education and healthcare. To me, this is just a golden parachute, as the man knew he was headed to Metro Vancouver for a high-paying job.”
Metro Vancouver’s finances are coming under greater scrutiny after the unelected regional government revealed in March that the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant had gone $3 billion over budget and wouldn’t be completed until 2030. The project was supposed to cost around $700 million and be open in 2020.
Commissioner Jerry Dobrovolny made the bombshell announcement on a Friday afternoon in the middle of March break.
Ex-New Westminster Mayor Jonathan X. Cote and his successor, Patrick Johnstone. (X/Cote)
No surprise, Dobrovolny is the highest-paid bureaucrat at Metro Vancouver’s Metrotown headquarters. Metro Vancouver reported Dobrovolny’s total $711,668 pay package for 2023, including $451,949 base pay, $222,578 under other and taxable benefits and $37,141 in expenses.
Dobrovolny and two other bureaucrats accompanied Mayors Mike Hurley (Burnaby), Brad West (Port Coquitlam), Malcolm Brodie (Richmond) and John McEwan (Anmore) to a drainage convention in Holland earlier this month. Metro Vancouver has not released the approved budget for the entourage’s travel and accommodation.
Eby said June 17 that Metro Vancouver ought to appoint an independent auditor to examine the troubled North Vancouver project. Outgoing chair George Harvie, who is also the Delta mayor, called for a review on June 18, but he offered no details about the reviewer, terms of reference or the deadline. According to Jillian Glover, a spokesperson for Metro Vancouver, “at this time, the scope and details of the review remain to be determined.”
Seven councillors from five municipalities want B.C. Auditor General Michael Pickup to audit the project, which received almost $200 million from Victoria. Four of those councillors, Surrey’s Linda Annis, New Westminster’s Daniel Fontaine, Richmond’s Kash Heed and Maple Ridge’s Ahmed Yousef, want a governance review and, ultimately, direct elections for Metro Vancouver directors.
How many Canadian lawmakers are colluding with foreign adversaries, like Xi Jinping’s China?
Who are they? Will they ever be held accountable?
Those questions remain unanswered after the heavily censored special report by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP).
On this edition of thePodcast, host Bob Mackin welcomes Sam Cooper, the investigative reporter behind TheBureau.news, to analyze the latest twist in Canada’s foreign interference scandal.
Cooper authored “Wilful Blindness: How a network of narcos, tycoons and CCP agents infiltrated the West” and his reporting for Global News in late 2022 and early 2023 helped pave the way for the Hogue Commission public inquiry into China’s meddling in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
“For people like you and me, I don’t think there’s much shock value in what NSICOP confirmed,” Cooper said. “They did go further than Justice Hogue, in saying that some Canadian parliamentarians wittingly or through wilful blindness —which I liked that they used that word from my book title — knowingly accepted transfers, concealed or layered, to disguise their origin.”
Plus, this week’s Pacific Rim and Pacific Northwest headlines.
Could Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown have been one of the Conservative leadership hopefuls targeted by the Chinese government in 2022?
The June 3 bombshell report by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians said some lawmakers are “semi-witting or witting participants in the efforts of foreign states to interfere in our politics.”
Brampton Mayor and Conservative Party leadership candidate Patrick Brown at the Chinese Canadian Society for Political Engagement in Vancouver (WeChat)
The heavily censored “Special Report on Foreign Interference in Canada’s Democratic Processes and Institutions” also said foreign actors targeted party leadership campaigns.
“Three sentences were deleted to remove injurious or privileged information,” the report said. “The sentences described two specific instances where [People’s Republic of China] officials allegedly interfered in the leadership races of the Conservative Party of Canada.”
Brown was the sixth candidate to run for the leadership in March 2022, in the wake of the caucus vote to remove Erin O’Toole. Under O’Toole, the party took a hawkish stance toward China, but remained in opposition after the September 2021 election.
O’Toole told the Hogue Commission on foreign interference in April 2024 that Chinese misinformation cost the party between five and nine seats in the election and led to the end of his leadership.
Brown did not make it to the finish line, however. He was disqualified in July 2022 due to campaign financing violations. Two months later, Pierre Poilievre was elected leader.
In the spring of 2022, Brown made at least two trips to Vancouver to meet with politically active figures in the Lower Mainland’s Chinese community. Several of them leaders of groups affiliated with the Chinese consulate’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, which promotes the Chinese Communist Party in B.C.
Sing Tao daily’s April 2, 2022 edition included a photograph of Brown at a boardroom table with about a dozen people for an event hosted by the Canada Committee 100 Society (CC 100). Founding president, Ding Guo, seated next to Brown, is also known as an advisor to B.C. NDP premier David Eby. One of CC 100’s advisors is Victor Oh, the pro-China Conservative senator who reached the mandatory retirement age of 75 this month.
The Sing Tao story said some of the attendees told Brown the party should learn from the defeat of two Conservative MPs in the 2021 election. That was a reference to incumbents Kenny Chiu (Steveston-Richmond East) and Alice Wong (Richmond Centre), who were replaced by Liberals Parm Bains and Wilson Miao, respectively.
Brown told the meeting that “he believes that the most important thing for legislators is to reflect the opinions of voters in the constituency and serve them, rather than to be favoured by other things, let alone be ignored by the phenomenon of racial discrimination occurring in the local area.”
Chiu lost after a WeChat disinformation campaign that alleged his proposal for a registry of lobbyists for foreign governments would stoke anti-Chinese racism. Bains repeated that theme during his campaign.
On May 28, 2022, Brown was back in Vancouver. He made a Saturday afternoon visit to the Chinese Canadian Society for Political Engagement (CCSPE), also known as the “Chinese Canadian Voting Alliance Activity Centre.” The former Domino’s Pizza on Dunbar Street had been converted into a clubhouse for an unregistered third party that promoted ethnic Chinese candidates through in-person events, its 51Vote.org website and WeChat channel.
Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown in Vancouver in May 2022 (WeChat)
Brown and 20 others appeared in a group photo, circulated on WeChat, inside the facility. To Brown’s right in the second row, the honorary chair of the the Canadian Alliance of Chinese Associations, Yongtao Chen. To his left, CCSPE founder Kong Qingcun. Next to Kong, Harris Niu, leader of the Canadian Community Service Association.
Maria Ling Xu, president of the United Global Chinese Women’s Association of Canada, stood in the front row before Chen. Wearing a mask, second from left, was Theresa ZhanZhan Feng, an aide to BC United leader Kevin Falcon. Fourth from left was Chen’s wife, Sang Chengqun, who helped recruit members for Brown.
Feng did not respond to requests for comment.
The NSICOP report said that officials from China “used clandestine networks to conduct foreign interference in Greater Vancouver.” The unreacted version contained six sentences that “describe PRC’s efforts to leverage its network to support a specific political candidate, noted the work of certain organizations and individuals within the network, and noted an effort by a security and intelligence organization to counter the work of one of the individuals.”
Brown did not respond to interview requests made to his press secretary, Gary Collins.
Canada’s Liberal Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, flogging a scheme to earn at least $20,000 a month, with a minimal investment of $350.
A company, whose website is registered to a service provider in Chicago, is behind ads on YouTube and related websites that portray Chrystia Freeland as an endorser. The videos are packaged as reports on CTV News Channel and CBC News Network, complete with anchor commentary.
Liberal Finance Minister in deepfake videos seen on YouTube (YouTube)
One of three clips that this reporter spotted by chance on May 31 on YouTube shows Freeland at a news conference April 7 in Toronto. That is where she announced $2.4 billion in grants to boost Canada’s artificial intelligence sector.
But the words on the video were not those that she spoke at the pre-budget photo op. Nor were the words spoken by the TV anchors.
The videos are actually artificial intelligence-generated deepfakes. What, if anything, are Freeland’s staff and the Liberal government doing to combat the misuse of the rapidly evolving technology?
“The videos and websites you reference are fake and present false and misleading information,” said Shanna Taller, media relations advisor for the Department of Finance. “Cases of unauthorized image use are handled by law enforcement agencies, such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. For further questions on whole-of-government action, please contact the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.”
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC) media phone line voice mail was full and emails were returned as blocked. YouTube has not responded for comment.
In March, the CAFC website contained a new technology bulletin. It warned that deepfake technology uses “machine-learning algorithms to create realistic-looking fake videos or audio recordings. This is most commonly seen in investment and merchandise frauds where fake celebrity endorsements and fake news are used to promote the fraudulent offers.”
“If you see a celebrity or trustworthy figure promoting merchandise or crypto investments, remember that the video can be a deepfake, created with AI technology. Do your research before you buy anything,” the CAFC bulletin said.
An expert in spotting disinformation said this may be more than a fraudulent investment scheme, but someone seeking to advance their political interests.
Marcus Kolga (MLI)
“There may be not that many Canadians who are falling for this specifically right now. But, it’s a very worrying sign of what may yet be to come,” said Marcus Kolga of DisinfoWatch.org.
Kolga said a close look at the videos revealed the audio was not seamlessly synchronized with the movement of lips. But that may not be detected by casual viewers who do not follow Canadian politics on a daily basis. He is concerned that the technology is advancing so rapidly that deepfake videos could become undetectable.
That would open the door to financial and geopolitical manipulation and disruption on a mass scale. Governments need to enforce existing laws and enact new ones to prevent chaos, he said. In the case of the Freeland videos, Kolga said YouTube and others have a major role to play and should not be earning advertising revenue from carrying deepfake ads.
“Today, it may be Chrystia Freeland, but tomorrow it could be a Jagmeet Singh, the next day, it could be Pierre Poilievre,” Kolga said. “You just never know, especially when we’re talking about foreign regimes. We know that China was pretty intensely using deepfakes during the Taiwanese presidential election. They weren’t great, if you knew what to look out for, you could tell all the telltale signs of a deepfake were there, again, with the synchronization issues and such. But this technology is only improving and it’s improving not yearly, it’s improving every month.”
In May, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission proposed a $6 million fine for political consultant Steve Kramer who was behind robocalls two days prior to the first-in-the-nation presidential primary in New Hampshire. Those robocalls featured deepfake audio using President Joe Biden’s voice to encourage citizens to abstain from the primary and save their vote for the November presidential election.
Kramer was also arrested in New Hampshire on bribery, intimidation and voter suppression charges.
