The Conservative party of Canada may have been the first political party in this country to use AI-generated footage for an ad, but it won’t be the last according to experts.
The party released a video on social media June 5 depicting people lining up at a food bank, losing their jobs and losing their homes with the punchline that they were only “technically hungry,” “technically homeless” or “technically unemployed.”
The ad was referencing data released by Statistics Canada which indicated that Canada experienced a technical recession for the first three months of 2026. The party wrote that the ad was produced using generative AI. It also incorporated real footage of Prime Minister Mark Carney evading a question from a reporter who asked him about Canada being in a recession.
“I think we will see more and more parties and actors relying on this technology, because it is cheap to generate this type of content,” said Anatoliy Gruzd, the director of research at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Social Media Lab. “I think it will be mostly disseminated through informal communications, through online groups, communities, WhatsApp chats, where there’s less of oversight from communication platforms, or, you know, other governing bodies.”
The Conservative ad was posted on the X page of Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsmann and had 150-thousand views in just 20 days.
Experts in political communications warn that increasing use of generative AI use in political ads or videos could contribute to the decline of trust in what people see online.
TMU’s Social Media Lab published a study in 2025 exploring public attitudes about the use of generative AI in Canada. It found that 59 per cent of people felt they could no longer trust the political news they saw online “due to the possibility that it may be fake or manipulated.”
More than two-thirds of people were also worried about the potential for generative AI to influence future elections.
“It is becoming really omnipresent in lots of other aspects of life. So, why wouldn’t it start showing up in politics too?” said Elizabeth Dubois, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in political uses of AI. Dubois warns that Canadians are in for a reckoning when it comes to what is and isn’t appropriate use of AI.
“We don’t have good social norms around these uses yet,” Dubois told CTV news.
Some of those norms include properly labelling or any kind of mark to tell the view that the content they are watching was made with artificial intelligence. The Conservative ad does have a label in the bottom right corner of the screen saying “AI generated.”
“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. “Transparency is important. That’s why we clearly disclosed the use of AI in both the video caption and within the video itself.”
Fischer added that the ad was created by Canadians who work in digital content.
The use of AI in political communications has mushroomed in recent years and U.S. President Donald Trump has seemingly been leading the way. In December of 2024, as he began to threaten annexation of Canada as the 51st state, Trump posted an AI generated of himself standing beside a Canadian flag, looking at a mountain range with the caption “Oh Canada!”
The mountain in the image was the iconic Matterhorn mountain which is found in the Swiss Alps and not the Canadian Rockies. In April, Trump an AI image of himself as a Jesus-like figure which drew widespread criticism. On his Truth Social, Trump would later claim that it was meant to portray him as a doctor.
“You can manufacture images, people, messages in a way that you’ve never been able to do in the past, very compelling, and relatively low cost, so the attraction to campaigns is going to be absolutely magnetic,” said Scott Reid, former director of communications to Prime Minister Paul Martin.
While the appeal is undeniable for people who run election campaigns, Reid also warns of the dangers that come along with the power of AI.
“You don’t just have the ability to shape messages, you have the ability to manipulate people, to manipulate established individuals, show them doing things that they have not done,” said Reid. “It’s both the power to manipulate messages, but it’s also the threat that it will be used to spread disinformation more powerfully and far further than it’s ever been done before.”
The federal government tabled the Safe Social media act on June 10, which would require social media platforms to label “synthetically generated” content that is shared on their platforms.
Despite a 2024 recommendation from Canada’s chief electoral officer, Stephane Perrault, to legislate labelling of election-related content. The newly-introduced act says nothing about requiring political parties to label AI-generated materials.
Reid says the mandate of election campaign mangers is to win and sway the “persuadable audience which could make the use of AI even more tempting. That is why he says he also believes guardrails must be put in place.
“If there are not rules established, then we will see a level of disinformation and abuse that we have literally never seen before,” Reid told CTV News. “Everything else leads us to an even worse toxic soup than we’re in already, when you take a look at social media platforms.”
