The Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections (OCCE) announced in its annual report its plans to “explore the use” of artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies to influence its operations in the upcoming year.
Commissioner Caroline Simard’s office did not specify how it intends to integrate AI. Funding allocated in January 2025 is aimed at equipping the OCCE to handle “today’s electoral environment” challenges. This plan includes staffing under a new structure reflecting “ongoing modernization efforts,” though explicit details were not included.
An OCCE spokesperson told BetaKit that AI adoption is “still in the early stages” with “no specific tools or timelines” in place.
The Commissioner acts independently, ensuring adherence to the Canada Elections Act and Referendum Act by the government, political parties, and others. Responsibilities include managing financing, nominations, campaigning, and advertising. Recently, the OCCE dealt with rising AI-related concerns, such as election disinformation via bots, AI-generated images, and deepfakes.
The OCCE works alongside Elections Canada, which runs votes and referendums, and the Leaders’ Debates Commission, which handles debate sessions during federal elections.
An email to BetaKit reiterated the OCCE’s early-stage AI adoption status, mentioning “no specific tools or timelines” yet.
According to Concordia University Associate Professor of Communication Studies Fenwick McKelvey, the Commissioner’s interest in AI may prove crucial. AI presents “lots of opportunities” for the OCCE, especially in processing Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) requests. Large-language models (LLMs) might provide “more legible” answers and help the government manage ATIP requests more effectively, said McKelvey.
Current efforts aim to develop LLMs for such tasks. Enterprise AI developer Cohere’s vision involves AI helping with ATIP and freedom of information requests, suggesting AI tools can efficiently process “repetitive, rule-based” demands and facilitate document retrieval and redaction.
AI may aid the Commissioner in navigating the “opaque landscape” of elections where AI-generated content poses issues. The OCCE sees it as a concern during the 2025 federal election, with a CBC-obtained briefing note warning of probable complaints about deepfakes and other AI uses that might breach the Canada Elections Act.
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Adopting AI poses potential legal challenges, especially in privacy and copyright domains. McKelvey noted the ongoing uncertainty of AI’s legality in Canada. Both the OCCE and RCMP have taken actions against Clearview AI’s data scraping due to privacy law concerns. Additionally, major Canadian news outlets sued OpenAI and Cohere for allegedly using copyrighted content for training their models without authorization.
Industry experts and academics, including LawZero co-founder and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, advocate for new legislation targeting deepfakes, suggesting penalties for election manipulation and other fraudulent activities.
The Commissioner benefits from a focused mandate, McKelvey explained, though it still requires the capacity