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Someone Is Paying for Millions of Fake Videos Pushing Alberta Into the US, and Carney Assembled a 24-Person Bench for the US Trade Fight.
News for residents of the “11th province”: Canadians abroad.
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Someone Is Paying for Millions of Fake Videos Pushing Alberta Into the US
Twenty YouTube channels. Forty million views in the past year. Titles like "Danielle Smith Just ANNOUNCED the Biggest Separation in Canadian History" and "Alberta Just GOT BACKED By The US! 51ST-52ND STATEHOOD INCOMING!" A new report from the Canadian Digital Media Research Network has mapped what it calls a coordinated network of “inauthentic” channels flooding Albertans with AI-slop videos pushing for separation - and nobody knows who is paying for it.
The researchers couldn't pin down the origin, but they found the channels share the same template and what they describe as matching "digital fingerprints." The only human they identified is a Pennsylvania-based voice actor. City names like Regina get mispronounced. The voiceovers mix AI-generated speech with clipped news footage. The report calls it "slopaganda" - low-quality, mass-produced political content designed to appear like it’s grassroots.
The Alberta Prosperity Project, an actual separatist group, says the story is overblown. CEO Mitch Sylvestre told CBC he'd never heard of any of those channels before being contacted by journalists, and that foreign interference in the Alberta debate is "a fairy tale."
For Canadians watching from abroad, the part that sticks is that there are 40 million views of videos pushing Alberta and Saskatchewan toward American statehood, and the people running Canada's real separatist movement say they weren’t even aware they existed.
Read more: CBC News
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A photo from the old country:
Carney Assembled a 24-Person Bench for the US Trade Fight
PM Mark Carney named a 24-person Canada-US advisory council on Tuesday, replacing the 19-person panel Trudeau put together when the tariff threats began in early 2025. The new roster is notably bipartisan - former Conservative leader Erin O'Toole, ex-cabinet minister Lisa Raitt, former UK envoy Ralph Goodale, and Nunavut's former premier P.J. Akeeagok are among the names, alongside Bank of Montreal CEO Darryl White and Canadian Chamber of Commerce president Candace Laing.
O'Toole says he took some convincing. He told reporters he called Pierre Poilievre first to make sure he wasn't about to be used as a wedge, and pushed Janice Charette - Carney's chief US negotiator - for assurances the council would actually do policy work and not just pose for photos. Charette is a former Privy Council clerk. By most accounts, she is not someone who simply poses for photos.
CUSMA - the Canada-US-Mexico trade agreement (once upon a time, NAFTA)- and its first formal review this year, and the Americans have reportedly been demanding concessions before Ottawa even sits at the table. A bipartisan advisory council won’t change the math on tariffs, but it does make it harder for Washington to frame the dispute as Canada's government fighting its own business community.
Whether a 24-person council moves the needle is another question altogether.
Read more: National Post