Imagine opening your favourite newspaper and seeing a story about your own community—only it has been torn out, rearranged and signed by a stranger who doesn’t exist. That is what happened in Nunavut when Nunatsiaq News, an award-winning newspaper, discovered a so-called news website using artificial intelligence to republish its journalists’ real reporting. The articles were presented as the work of Leah Qammaniq, a supposed Nunavut correspondent. She had no byline history, no real face, no body of work. Her photograph was a digital invention, her bio a lie. The byline was a mask. The machine behind it gathered the careful work of real reporters—people who had travelled by snowmobile, sat through hours of council meetings, interviewed elders and fishers and parents and teachers—and processed it into something that looked like journalism but was actually theft. There is something deeply unsettling about this. It is not just a violation of copyright; it is a violation of place and memory. Local news is how a community knows itself. When an algorithm steals those stories and claims them for a fictional person, the territory of truth becomes even harder to navigate. Readers in Nunavut had to wonder: if a reporter doesn’t exist, what else is invented? If a photograph can be manufactured, can trust also be fabricated? The answer we are beginning to learn is yes. And that is exactly why the world must stop treating artificial intelligence as a neutral tool and start treating it as something that can be used for harm, unless we build strong guardrails around it. Consider the practical impact. Nunatsiaq News has won awards because its reporters know the North—know the names of small hamlets, know the languages, know the history, know the difference between a council’s motion and a minister’s promise. That knowledge cannot be scraped. A large language model can imitate a reporter’s voice for a paragraph or two, but it cannot attend a community feast or stand in a blizzard to document a housing crisis. Yet it can flood the internet with stories that look factual. It can drown out the voices of people who actually know what they are talking about. This is not an abstract worry for media executives. It is a lived reality for readers and journalists. It is also a warning. If we cannot protect the work of reporters in Nunavut, no journalism anywhere is safe.
Long before a fake reporter appeared in Nunavut, the warning had already been issued. The Right Honourable Louise Arbour, in her installation speech as Governor General, spoke of the danger of a society in which knowledge and belief, truth and falsehood, facts and assumptions are increasingly blurred. With instant access to vast amounts of information, she said, it is tempting to pay little attention to the reliability of sources. She called on all of us to protect the public space in which national debates take place—schools and universities, the media, political parties, unions and civil society organizations. That warning has only grown more urgent. The Government of Canada itself has recognized the problem. In its recent discussion paper on artificial intelligence and transparency, it acknowledged that Canadians now encounter news reporting, product reviews and audio-visual content across the internet without any indication of whether a person wrote it, an AI system generated it, or some combination of both. It also pointed out a particular concern: generative AI greatly enables the creation and dissemination of deceptive or misleading content. There is an irony here. The government can see the problem, define it eloquently and even warn about it—yet it has not moved to solve the worst part of the problem. Meanwhile, the public is already anxious. According to a survey conducted for News Media Canada, 78 per cent of Canadians say they are concerned about fake news and disinformation. That is not an elite worry. It is a kitchen-table worry. It is the feeling of watching something on social media and not knowing whether to trust it. It is the suspicion that politicians, advertisers and algorithms are pulling strings. And it is the reason so many people are hungry for something reliable, something verified, something human. The more synthetic content fills the internet, the more we crave a real name, a real face, a real newsroom behind a story. The danger is not that artificial intelligence will replace journalists. The danger is that it will bury them, confuse us about who is speaking and make us forget why credibility matters.
Yet for all the warnings, there is a striking absence of action. When the federal government released Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy: AI for All, the word “copyright” never appeared—not once. That is remarkable. An entire national strategy about artificial intelligence, built at a time when AI companies are vacuuming up the creative work of Canadians, failed to mention the legal right that protects that work. It is as if the government had announced a plan to manage water resources without mentioning rivers. The result is that Canadian news outlets are left to fight algorithmic theft with one hand tied behind their backs. The problem is not only economic, although it is certainly that. Newsrooms are already struggling. If an AI company can scrape an entire newspaper’s archives, repackage its reporting and publish it under a fake name, the original producers get less traffic, less advertising, less influence. The value of their work is stolen and redirected to platforms that paid nothing for it. There is also a sovereignty dimension. In a country as large and diverse as Canada, with a small population spread across a vast geography, trusted information is what holds the country together. When misinformation and disinformation flow freely, and when foreign platforms control digital space, Canadian identity and Canadian values become vulnerable. The government has a responsibility to protect Canadian intellectual property and to keep the value of that property in Canada, for Canadians. That is not protectionism; it is common sense. A country that cannot protect its own stories cannot protect its future. The issue is not about being afraid of technology. It is about being honest about who is harmed when technology is allowed to take whatever it wants, without permission, without payment and without accountability.
What would meaningful action look like? It need not require untangling every mystery of artificial intelligence. There are concrete steps available today. First, Canada should clearly and unequivocally state that there will be no text and data-mining exception to copyright—meaning AI companies cannot legally help themselves to news content simply because it is available online. Second, the federal government can use its procurement power. When buying products and services, Ottawa can demand that suppliers commit to respecting creator rights, ensuring that taxpayer dollars never support companies that steal content. Third, Canada should align with the approach of the U.K. competition authority, which gives publishers an opt-out to control how their news content is surfaced in Google’s AI answers. This is not a heavy-handed intervention; it simply gives the people who create the news a say in how their work is used. Fourth, the minister of industry should direct the Competition Bureau to conduct a market study into Google’s AI/search crawler, so that the public can see exactly how these systems operate and whether their dominance is harmful. Fifth, Canada should introduce and pass “bad bot” legislation similar to the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act now before the U.S. Congress, making it illegal to use bots to circumvent content protections and scrape news sites without permission. These are practical, focused measures. They do not stop innovation. They do not villainize technology. They draw a line: bots must obey the same basic rules of property and transparency that people do. A journalist cannot walk into a newsroom, take the day’s work, put a fake name on it and sell it. A bot should not be allowed to do the same simply because it works faster. These measures also send a broader message: Canada will not allow its newsrooms to become unpaid data farms for artificial intelligence. It will not allow the work of its journalists to be repackaged as cheap digital imitations. It will protect the people who ask tough questions, who check one more source, who stay late to make sure the facts are right.
This week, National Newspaper Week 2026 celebrates the people behind the news. It is a chance to remember that journalism is not a product of automation but of human curiosity, courage and persistence. The program introduces a fictional character named Al Gorithm, a figure who highlights an increasingly important distinction: an algorithm can decide what you see, but it doesn’t sit through a council meeting, interview a local business owner, cover a championship game or hold decision-makers accountable. Al Gorithm is a wonderfully honest name because algorithms are not evil by themselves; they are just useful tools that can be used poorly. But when they are used to steal journalism and spread fake stories, they become something dangerous. The joy of this year’s campaign is that it focuses on the ordinary acts that make real journalism real. A reporter knocks on a door. A photographer waits for the light. An editor checks a name twice. A fact-checker makes a phone call. None of that can be replaced by a language model, however clever. None of that can be manufactured by a bot, however fast. It is human work, done by human beings, for human beings. National Newspaper Week is also a reminder of what is at stake. The AI experiments of the last few years have revealed a terrifying pattern: too often, they borrow from humanity without returning anything. They have made it easier to spread lies, easier to impersonate real people and easier to confuse readers about what is true. They have also made credible, professionally produced journalism more valuable than ever. The algorithm can feed you a thousand headlines, but it cannot tell you which one is true. Only a person can do that—a person who was there, who checked, who knows the difference between a rumour and a fact, who is willing to put their name on the line. That is worth celebrating and worth defending.
Protecting that journalism will take more than awareness. It will take policy. The federal government can sustain real journalism by real journalists by maintaining the Online News Act, which is already seeing $100 million flowing annually from Google to news businesses. It can maintain the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit at 35 per cent, which helps newsrooms keep reporters on staff. It can maintain the Local Journalism Initiative, which funds coverage in communities that might otherwise disappear from the news map. And it can earmark 25 per cent of federal advertising spending to trusted news outlets. These are not giveaways. They are investments in a public good. A democracy needs shared facts. It needs reporters who can investigate a government, question a corporation and tell the story of a neighbourhood. None of that happens by accident. It happens because a community decides that journalism matters and is willing to pay for it. The federal government already has the tools. The Online News Act is one. The tax credit is another. The commitment to local news is another. What is missing is the will to use them together and to protect the work from AI theft. This is not just a matter for media executives or policy specialists. It is a matter for everyone who has ever read a story and learned something important about their neighbour, their country or themselves. Digital sovereignty and cultural sovereignty matter. Canadian stories matter. Facts matter. Real journalists matter. If Canadians remember one thing during National Newspaper Week 2026, let it be this: the algorithm may decide what you see, but it does not report the news. A person does. And that person deserves to be protected.