The Conservative Party of Canada released a political ad on June 5 that featured AI-generated footage, an advertising tactic experts expect to see more of as political campaigns around the world embrace the technology.
The video depicts people lining up at food banks, losing their jobs and having their homes repossessed, while being soothed by the caveat that they are “only technically hungry,” “technically unemployed” and “technically homeless.”
The ad is a response to recent Statistics Canada data that indicated the country had slipped into a technical recession in the first three months of 2026, and attempts to create a narrative that Prime Minister Mark Carney is indifferent to the country’s affordability crisis.
Multiple experts told CBC News it’s one of the first times a federal Canadian political party has employed AI-generated footage in its advertising.
“Generative AI has for a long time already been impacting the way we learn about our political systems,” said Elizabeth Dubois, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in political uses of AI. “It is a concern for Canadians and something that I think is going to persist as we see more of these experimental uses of the tools.”
Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon says the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act will help keep Canadians safe in the digital age. ‘I think it’s a common-sense approach to what Canadians and what average folks want from their digital media,’ Solomon said on Monday about the new bill. ‘They want some control over their personal information.’
While the use of generative AI in politics is new in Canada, research suggests it’s already controversial. A 2025 study from Toronto Metropolitan University’s Social Media Lab found that about two-thirds of Canadians are concerned about the potential influence of generative AI on online political content and elections.
People “think that there is a real need for public policy and AI governance in this space,” said Dubois.
Despite that, Nathalie Smuha, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto specializing in the effect of AI on democracy, said voters who agree with the sentiment of an ad may not care that it’s synthetic.
“People that are already very open to this kind of messaging because they agree with the Conservative Party might not take issue with it at all,” she said. “They might say, ‘It might as well have been true.'”
The Trump effect
Political use of this technology has flourished worldwide in recent years, and has been a particular favourite of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Trump has shared countless AI images on social media during his second term in office, including one portraying himself as Jesus; a video of former president Barack Obama being arrested; and a video depicting a future version of Gaza, dubbed “Trump Gaza,” complete with a towering gold statue of himself.
The latter video, posted in February 2025, received more than 670,000 likes on the president’s Instagram account.
Responding to a reporter, U.S. President Donald Trump tried to explain an AI-generated image he posted to his Truth Social depicting him as a Jesus-like figure. The image drew widespread criticism and was removed from Trump’s account on Monday.
Smuha said the use of generative AI in political advertising is more widespread in the U.S. and Europe, where it’s particularly employed by populist parties to “weaken their political opponent.”
“This pattern can partially be explained by the fact that populist leaders attach a lot of attention to communication,” she said. “They care a lot about the type of messaging.”
There has been limited research on Canadians’ views on AI-generated political ads, although the 2025 TMU study found that right-leaning Canadians are 11 percentage points more likely than left-leaning Canadians to use AI chatbots to get information about elections or politics.
A 2024 Tech Policy Press/YouGov poll found that 78 per cent of Americans think political campaigns should be prohibited from posting “deceptive” AI-generated content targeting candidates, and 87 per cent think political groups should be required to disclose the use of AI-generated content in political ads.
AI labels often ignored
The footage shared by the Conservative Party in its recent ad is labelled as AI-generated in the bottom-right corner of the video.
“Like many organizations, the CPC is exploring responsible ways to use AI to enhance its communications,” said Sarah Fischer, director of communications for the Conservative Party of Canada, in an email to CBC News. “Transparency is important. That’s why we clearly disclosed the use of AI in both the video caption and within the video itself.”
In doing so, the ad followed best practices for using AI-generated content, Dubois said. But that standard isn’t currently legally mandated and doesn’t go far enough to alert viewers, she added.
“We do know that the little labels in the bottom corner are often ignored,” Dubois said.
The Safe Social Media Act, which was tabled by the Canadian federal government on June 10, would require social media companies to label “synthetically generated” content shared on their platforms.
Yet it doesn’t require political parties to label AI-generated material, despite a 2024 recommendation from Canada’s chief electoral officer, Stéphane Perrault, that Ottawa legislate labelling on election-related content.
“It would be better for everyone if all parties did this labelling,” said Chris Tenove, assistant director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia. “Whether it should be a statutory requirement is, I think, an open question because enforcement could be hard.”
Smuha said that even despite labelling, AI-generated images can influence viewers’ mental processes, especially if they already agree with the content’s messaging.
“Even if people know that something is inauthentic, that’s not necessarily going to protect them from some of the risks that we’re seeing — notably, the emotional impact the generated video has.”
