The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Are Ontario's Municipal Elections Ready for the AI Era?

Episode Date: October 20, 2026

Ontario's municipal election rules were written long before social media and AI transformed political campaigning. Are they still up to the task? Andrea Coyne, deputy clerk for the Town of Oakville, and Riley Brockington, president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, discuss whether the Municipal Elections Act needs an update. Then, Rory White, technology and democracy reporter at Canada's National Observer, examines how AI tools could change the way candidates campaign and what that could mean for future elections.Donate Today : https://tvo.me/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What a difference a year can make. When you support TVO, you're helping bring trusted stories, inspiring ideas, and lifelong learning to people across Ontario. And as a thank you, you can receive the 2027 TVO calendar. Filled with beautiful photography from the documentaries and programs your support helps make possible. It's a year-long reminder of the learning, beauty, and discovery your generosity supports. Donate $40 or more to claim yours today at TVO.com slash calendar 2027 and make every month a little more inspiring. It's almost election day in Ontario. Now, some of us have cast our ballots already and a lot of us have made plans for October 26.

I'm talking about the basics here. Where to vote, how to vote, and who to vote for. But what happens when the information you're relying on isn't accurate. Maybe it's a social media post getting the facts wrong about what kind of ID you need, or an AI-powered search result that sends you to the wrong polling station, or a video of a candidate that isn't quite what it seems. In the age of AI, how do you separate fact from fiction? And are election laws keeping up with technology?

We dig into how mis and disinformation are shaping elections and what you can do to cut through the noise. I'm Jay and J. Jagan,athan, and this is The Rundown. Municipal Elections Act includes rules for things like election ads from candidates and third parties. Now, it was passed back in 1996, and it has been updated since then, but can it deal with the challenges of social media and AI? Andrea Coyne, Riley Brockington, great to have you on the rundown. Andrew, I'm going to start with you. You have worked on this issue of misinformation, disinformation, for quite a while.

What are we talking about when we talk about this municipal election and what we are seeing, sort of with that? From a municipal election administration perspective, misinformation can really be as simple as false or misleading information that just simply causes confusion with voters. And it could be around voter eligibility, voting methods, voting processes, and it really is up to the administration

to figure out how to combat that and how to ensure that voters have that accurate information to make the informed choices that they need to make. Riley, I'm hoping you give us the big picture. as president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, also known as AMO, you represent regional local municipalities. So help us understand. Is this a concern for AMO?

Yes, it is, because the integrity of the municipal elections across Ontario is critical. We need to maintain and defend the public trust and confidence in fair and free elections and any type of inappropriate behavior that is meant to mislead the voters, is meant to get an advantage from one candidate or another, and frankly, to cheat is unacceptable. So we take this very seriously. We want to maintain a very high integrity of the system, and this is something that AMO follows and is concerned about it.

Andrea, I want to pick up on the word Riley uses cheat, and you're on the ground. You are the deputy clerk for the town of Oakville. You are on the ground right now working on the Oakville election. What are you encountering this election cycle? So it's an interesting question because we're actually seeing more confusion, again, as I mentioned earlier, around the voting process. What identification do people need when they come to the voting location? What voting methods are being used?

How are the ballots being counted? So from the election administration perspective, we're less removed from what's happening on the candidate campaign side and more with what's happening on the voter end and what they're seeing in terms of getting out to that location and ensuring that they can. can cast their ballot. So, Andrew, let's maybe clarify with, you know, with some of that misinformation and disinformation, what do we actually need when you go to the polls? So in Oakville, the Municipal Elections Act does outline all of the identification requirement, but there is a lot of confusion around do I need a birth certificate? Do I need a photo identification? So while some municipalities do require above and beyond what the Elections Act stipulates. Typically, it is

identification. There's about 25 pieces that the legislation lays out and it has to have your qualifying address, but photo identification is not required. Many municipalities like Oakville encourage them the voters to bring voter cards, voter notices if they have

distributed them, but typically they're not required. This is actually some of, one of the issues that does contribute to that voter confusion is at the municipal level. Again, we are all following the same legislation. but municipal clerks do have the ability to establish procedures above and beyond what the Municipal Act outlines.

I have to imagine, Andrea, that the days have been long during this campaign cycle. Help me understand how much of your time is being spent on dealing with this? I have to start by saying I have an amazing team. We have an amazing team of election staff, communication support staff, the web team. So everybody really works very long hours during the time. this time. And we try and get ahead of it. So we really are trying to be proactive with the communication that we're putting out there to both voters and candidates. I like to say that candidates is the best way to start with it because from the moment they file their registration, you have

the ability to provide them with the accurate information that they can then turn and relate to their potential voters because they're the ones going out and knocking on those doors every single day. Riley, with that being said, you are acclaimed in your position, but that doesn't stop you from door knocking. From voters' perspective, if they want to get more information on candidates, outside of sort of the dates and the administrative stuff, where should voters be going for that? Well, I can speak to my perspective here in the City of Ottawa. The City of Ottawa has an Elections Ottawa website. It lists all the candidates registered for mayor, all the city councilor races, and the school board trustee candidates

in the four school boards that we have in Ontario. That's a great source. They also reach out to a 311 through the city who can direct them to that page. Certainly within my office, we've received a number of inquiries about the races or candidates in the other races, which is very important.

But as I speak in my own ward, I talk about the importance of educating herself about who the candidates are, the positions that they're taking, what they stand, on. It's equally important for candidates, obviously, to get out there and share their platform and message with voters. But it's very important that people know where to vote. It's important to know when the voting dates are. If you can't vote, if you're not going to be in town on

October 26th, there are multiple ways to vote. And municipalities have different ways of voting, not just in person. You can vote by mail. And like I said, you can vote through various pre-werews. voting locations in your municipality. Andrea, you talked about the team that you have behind you in Oakville. I want to understand a little bit more about the tools that you guys have. When it comes to responding to misinformation and how it spreads, what do you have in the toolkit? So we do have a social team that does monitor what they're seeing online and what they're seeing on the town's Facebook page, some comments that are made.

it really can be tricky to balance when a comment should be responded to and when it should be not responded to. Because in some cases, if you do respond or engage in some comments, then that might just further enhance the misinformation that's getting out there. So we really are, we try and be as proactive as possible and just reiterate to all the voters of the residents and the community, the accurate information and where you can find that online. Riley, what role do social media companies play here when it comes to misinformation, disinformation on election cycle?

Well, that is a significant question. Certainly, we don't want to see any type of communication medium abused for the purposes of election communications or outreach to the public. We don't want any tools to be used to give someone an unfair advice. if they breached the Municipal Elections Act, are simply just using them inappropriately. That's a much bigger question because obviously social media companies have been approached for other matters and they seem quite hesitant

to engage or restrict the use of their platforms. But I think the public has a role here to play to call out bad behavior and inappropriate conduct, inappropriate conducts, misuse of social media, misuse of AI, misuse of AI. We're starting to see that now. AI maybe isn't further advanced or accepted as a tool for elections yet, but certainly it will be coming. But candidates use various tools, people who want to engage in the municipal campaigns get involved as well. We heard from Ms. Coyne that her own cities, social media sites are sometimes used for that type of purpose. But really, I think the buck stops

locally where if the public sees inappropriate behavior happening, we have to call that out. And candidates just cannot engage in that inappropriate behavior either. Riley, we have talked social media. We've talked to candidates. We've talked voters. Is there a role here for provincial government to do something? I think so. My understanding is the Municipal Elections Act, which governs elections, is the set of rules. that we all must follow as candidates and people who want to engage in this process must follow has not been revised or modified in 11 years. Obviously, we've evolved.

Social media is much more at play. AI has now joined the party per se. And I think it's time coming out of the 2026 elections to reflect whether AMO or others, perhaps city clerks, their association across Ontario, can look at trends that we've heard. can do some sort of surveying or polling of candidates and their teams about their experience and ask them to identify any inappropriate use in that regard through various communications tools. So the Municipal Elections Act perhaps is time for a cyclical review. And like I said, social media really isn't touched upon in that act.

And perhaps it's time we have a conversation. Riley, I see Andrew is smiling a little bit with a head. nod there as you're mentioning that. So, Andrea, I do have to ask, what changes would you like to see with the Municipal Elections Act that would perhaps help fix some of these problems? There's been a lot of advocacy over, I'd say, over the last 10, 15 years. I've been involved in elections for about 20 years now. And while there have been changes and great changes to the Municipal Elections Act to strengthen that enforcement, that the authority, they are trying to with the times, but there definitely has to be, in my opinion, a huge overhaul of the legislation

to really enhance the authority and the enforcement mechanisms that are behind the legislation. And I think this is rightly touched upon it as well with respect to social media. And we really need to recognize that it's 2026 AI platforms, GenAI. it's used on the daily by some people who don't even realize it. So we really just want to ensure that the legislation that we have to adhere to is up to date with our current society. Andrew, you talk about generative AI. Give me an example.

When you talk about people who don't even know they're using, what are you actually talking about? Well, I think it's simple. This is something that keeps me up at night sometimes. But you jump onto your internet explorer, whichever one you choose to use and you might even just say, hey, I have to vote tomorrow, where do I go? And so it pulls the information that it can,

but you might not even realize that it's not actually pulling from the most accurate source. And that's where we are trying to inform voters, know before you vote. That's our tagline. So we're really just trying to drive voters and reminding candidates that you really want to know before you vote. You want to go to that accurate information,

which in most cases is the municipality's election website. Riley, what is at stake here? Help us understand a little bit. Well, I think like everyone who administers runs in elections, is engaged in elections, as I said earlier, wants to defend the integrity of the entire process. We've had inappropriate behaviors in elections since the dawn of time. This is not new. There are people who engage in the electoral process, either as candidates, volunteers, for a candidate, people who have an axe to grind, people who don't support elections, who have misbehaved. And that's why we have legislation. That's why we have rules that govern this process. But we have to call out bad behavior. And if we see trends in bad behavior,

we have a role, whether it's through AMO, Clerks Association, candidates, to bring this to the province's attention and say, we believe there are areas here that are not addressed through the Municipal Elections Act. We believe that our behaviors that are trending upward over time that we want to bring to your attention, that we need a further discussion on. But at the end of the day, people who vote need to be assured that the process is fair. It's neutral. And that there are reasonable rules in place that govern how those elections are held and administered. That's the expectations of every voter across this province. And that's what AMA will always defend.

So help me understand who should be responsible for responding when misinformation spreads during election? I'd like to say it definitely is a whole of society approach. I think, as you mentioned, everybody needs to be involved in ensuring that election integrity is maintained and that voters are informed and they feel. confident in the process, but I do feel like there should be some overall oversight at the provincial level with respect to the municipal elections. Do you find there's enough will to make some changes when it comes to elections?

Because ultimately, in the end today, this is a race to elect winners. There are losers, of course, and if it's working for some people, I imagine why change it if it works? Andrea? I'd like to think that there is, I'm positive about the changes that we might see in future years. Elections Ontario recently took over the authority of the voters list at the municipal level. That was a couple of years ago that that came into effect. So that is, in my opinion, one step in the right direction in having that provincial oversight over the work that all 444 municipalities

do every four years. Andrea, I want to pick up on some of what Riley had to say about the impact. This has one democracy here. If there are no changes, if we don't see government take a, you know, I'll look at this. As you mentioned, 10, 15 years, this is nothing new, as Riley has mentioned. But if we don't take this as seriously as we should, what's the impact on our democracy? Well, we are already starting to see, I'd say, in the last eight, nine, ten years, the turnout and the engagement level is slowly decreasing. I think in 2022, across Ontario, municipalities saw the lower, the lowest voter turnout ever across the board. And so I feel like if we don't maintain electoral integrity at the municipal level,

we are going to start to see more and more voter apathy, people not feeling confident at the process and not feeling like their time is worth to engage in the electoral process. Riley, what is the message for those who are looking at this, not just voters and candidates, but those in provincial government, there's a message to kind of look at the Municipal Elections Act, to look at misinformation and disinformation seriously, whether it's this election or the next round. What is your message to them?

Well, associations like AMO, like clerks, city clerks across Ontario, want to work hand in hand with the provincial government, with the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. We all believe, as I said, the integrity of the system is paramount. We can do our work. We can survey. AMO can survey a sample of candidates. coming out of the 2026 election to get their feedback on various issues. We can share that in aggregate form with the ministry.

The clerks can share their experiences, what they've heard from candidates, what they've heard from residents and identify issues. We want the system to be as the best it can be. We want the system to maintain the trust and confidence of the people of Ontario. And we will do that what we need to do to share information, to share what we've heard on the ground, to make the 2030 municipal election process even better. But I do think the Municipal Elections Act is silent in some areas, including social media.

I think that's sort of a top of the list of areas that need to be explored. Andrea, I'm going to give you the last word here. You talk about the team that you have. We know how quickly misinformation can spread. We know in most cases when it comes to technology, we're usually behind when it comes to prevention. and trying to figure out, could this get worse before it gets fixed? I'd like to remain optimistic, but I think, again, referring to that whole of society approach, I think with the right partnerships, we can absolutely combat the challenges that AI

and the technological landscape that we're living in now can bring and really leverage the opportunities. As Riley mentioned, the work that AMO is doing, the work that I'm part of AMCTO, which is the Association of Municipal Managers, Clerks, Treasurers of Ontario. They are doing phenomenal advocacy work, and I know that there's partnerships with AMCTO and AMO as well in terms of how we can bring forward the legislative changes that we need the Municipal Elections Act. So I'd like to remain positive in that case and say, providing we all work together, we can maintain and uphold electoral integrity.

And with that, I'm going to leave you to it because I know both of you are quite busy. So we really appreciate you taking for the time to chat with us. Andrew Coyne, Riley Brockington. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Now, we did reach out to the Office of the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing for comment about whether there are any plans to update the Municipal Elections Act,

but did not get a response before this episode taped. So we've talked about some of the challenges municipalities are facing. But there's another question. Could AI change the way candidates campaign? In Toronto's mayoral race, candidate Brad Bradford's campaign made headlines for using an app that could generate comments for supporters to post online. Now, as AI power tools get more sophisticated, what kinds of things could they be used for? And what could that mean for future election campaigns? Rory White, great to have you on the rundown. How are you doing?

Good thanks. Thanks for having me on. Of course. Now, you report on technology and democracy at Canada's National Observer. I want to talk a little bit about your reporting that you did on the Victory app and Brad Bradford's campaign. Tell us a little bit about it. Yeah, so this is a new campaign technology that is being used in Canada for the first time. It was used by Brad Bradford's campaign in the municipal elections. And it basically generates AI comments for users to post online onto social media. So what we did was we investigated the way that it works.

We signed up for the application through the Bradford campaign. And once we're inside, we got notifications on our phone. And it basically instructed us to copy and paste an AI-generated comment onto social media and offered 25 points in the app for doing so. So it's this kind of new campaign technology that is quite experimental. And the idea is that gives the candidate the ability to control the narrative on social media and to respond if there's criticism of the candidate from other social media users. I should mention that we did reach out to the Bradford campaign.

We didn't hear back in time for this taping, but what did you hear back from his campaign? So Bradford's campaign told us that this is a cutting-edge technology and that they're bringing innovation to Canadian campaigns. They also told us that they have a team that is reviewing all of the comments and editing some of them before they go and are sent to users as well. they told us that there's no rewards for the posting these comments online and that the coins that users receive in the app are just entirely not of real-world value. So there is an incentive, but it doesn't translate into real-world prizes, for instance. I don't know if this is the only campaign that's using it, but is this actually legal? It's entirely legal.

So this is totally unregulated in Ontario's municipal elections. you can use AI to generate comments for people to post. The interesting part is that there's no disclaimers when it comes to the comments. So the comments don't say, this comment was AI generated by a campaign that was centrally created. Instead, the comments present as written by individual users. So they're often quite emotional. They say, like, I feel frustrated.

I'm feeling like you're the only candidate that can answer my fears. And so there's no actual transparency around where the comments came from. And that's the part that the researchers are most concerned about. And the real question with these sorts of technologies is, would they work if you were transparent and disclosed where it came from, would they say have the same impact on social media? Now, I understand that some people have pushed back and said, well, what's the difference between using something like this app versus, you know, giving a brochure, talking points to volunteers, going door to door when the messaging is similar? What do you say to that? I think they make a fair point. You know, this is really an extension of what's being used in campaigning for a long time.

In Canadian politics, they're having talking points handed out to supporters. It's not entirely new, but what AI enables these campaigns to do is something quite different. So if you imagine in the past, if a campaign wanted to give AI-generated comments to all their supporters, and they would have to be writing out these comments manually, they'd have campaign staffers that were writing individual comments for supporters. it wouldn't make sense financially for campaigns to do this. With AI, you can generate these automatically and give every comment or an individual comment to post online.

So it's reduced the barrier to entry to do this sort of stuff. And the key thing is that unlike talking points where it's, they say, for instance, come volunteer with Bradford's campaign, I'm a volunteer. These do not disclose that these individuals are in any way affiliated with the campaign. Rory, you have called this the first AI municipal election in Ontario. What else have you seen? Yeah, so the last municipal election was held in 2022, five weeks before the launch of ChatGPT. So this is really the first municipal election in Ontario where we have widespread use of AI tools.

And you can see them used by many candidates throughout the municipal elections. The Bradford campaign is no exception. I think we see them particularly using advertising on social media. We've conducted an analysis of the use of AI by campaigns in writing their ads that are posted on Instagram and Facebook. And we found evidence that many of them are using artificial intelligence to do so. There's very little disclosure that this is going on. But one of the really interesting parts is not just whether campaigns are using artificial intelligence or not, but how they're using it.

Because there's many different ways you can imagine using AI. For one example, you could translate an ad into a language that is reaching harder to reach voters, for instance. And this would be fairly uncontroversial compared to other use cases that are more deceptive. We are in the home stretch here. We've got about a week before people who haven't done advanced voting will start putting their votes in. What do they need to know when they're looking online at election information or content about candidates? The key thing is that you should look for official sources when it comes to the dates of the vote, for instance. But you should also have a healthy degree of skepticism when it comes to the materials you see online. comments can be misleading.

It may be that they're not who they say they are, but at the same time, we shouldn't really end up being too cynical because if we all just assume that anyone that has an opposing view is a bot that has been sort of contracted to support a political candidate, well, that's not really great for local democracy either. The key thing is to keep having conversations in person with people around us and realize that social media can be in some ways distorted, but not to lose hope entirely that,

that we can't have constructive conversations there. In some ways, is this an incentive for people to answer their doors if people are knocking and campaigning or perhaps meeting their candidates at meetings outside? Absolutely, yeah. I think it really is. And that's one of the justifications for the use of this technology is that people are no longer answering their doors. They're no longer engaging in person. And it makes these tools more attractive because you can reach voters in ways that don't rely on in-person meetings.

But there is something healthy in a democracy about having in-person conversations that aren't in these artificial environments that are framed around outrage and getting as many clicks as possible. So there is something to be said for just opening your door up when someone is coming with, you know, campaign conversations. Now, Rory, you had mentioned this is really the first time we're seeing AI on display on the campaign trails for this election. I'm scared to ask, but can we expect to see more? of this in future campaigns? Absolutely. This is the first time, as we mentioned, but it's only going to become more common over time to use AI tools. At the moment, there's zero regulation around the use of these tools. This is a time of real experimentation. And it's also the time when the norms are being

set about how we want AI to feature in our local democracies. How do we want these tools to be used in our local elections? Right now, it's pretty much up to the discretion of individual candidates to decide how they roll out AI into their campaigns. And this is the moment where we're really setting the norms of what we view as acceptable use of AI in Ontario. What got you interested in this? I'm quite curious, you know, I'm sure as you're, you know, democracy reporter, your following campaigns in L'Foren Center, but what was it that triggered you to kind of look into AI in its role on these campaign trails? Yeah, I mean, so I heard a pitch in January. I attended a campaign

summit called the next campaign summit in downtown Toronto. And it showed a lot of these vendors. They're the companies that are designing these tools to be used in political campaigns. And I sat there in person. I watched some of these talks from some of these vendors and that included the vendor behind the Victory app, this campaign tool we've been investigating. And the fascinating part for me was the way that they were pitching these tools to political strategists. So the Victory app, they pitched it as a digital civilian patrol responding with more efficiency and intelligence than any bot. That, of course, piques any journalist's interest. And so that was my entry point into this. And seeing how it interacted with real-world campaigns

was pretty fascinating for me. Well, Rory, we're going to leave it there. I want to thank you so much for your reporting. And thank you so much for your insights. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me on. So where do you go to find information about voting and candidates? Have you come across missed or disinformation this election season? Let us know. Send us an email to rundown at tvo.org or drop as a comment on our YouTube page. Until that, I will see you tomorrow. Starting this year, grade 10 students must complete the financial literacy graduation requirement to earn their Ontario secondary school diploma. Need a little help getting started? TVO learn is here for students, teachers, and families. Explore free curriculum-connected resources developed by

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