The Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections (OCCE) has revealed in its annual report that it will “explore the use” of artificial intelligence (AI) and “emerging technologies” to see how they will shape the government body’s approach for the next year.
Commissioner Caroline Simard’s office didn’t outline ways it might adopt AI. In its outlook, the OCCE expected to use funding announced in January 2025 to secure the tools needed for addressing the “challenges of today’s electoral environment.” This included staffing roles dictated by its new structure and reflected “ongoing modernization efforts,” but no further details.
An OCCE spokesperson told BetaKit AI adoption was “still in the early stages” with “no specific tools or timelines” planned.
The Commissioner is an independent officer who ensures the government, political parties, and others honour both the Canada Elections Act and Referendum Act. This includes core aspects like financing, nominations, campaigning, and advertising. More recently, the OCCE has been addressing rising issues with AI, including election disinformation facilitated by bots, AI-generated images, and deepfakes (AI-generated videos that resemble real people in false scenarios).
The OCCE complements Elections Canada, which administers votes and referendums, and the Leaders’ Debates Commission, which oversees debate sessions during federal elections.
In an email to BetaKit, an OCCE spokesperson said AI adoption was “still in the early stages” and that there were “no specific tools or timelines” planned so far.
The Commissioner’s openness to AI could be crucial, Concordia University Associate Professor of Communication Studies Fenwick McKelvey told BetaKit in an interview. He noted there are “lots of opportunities” to use AI in the OCCE, particularly for processing Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) requests submitted to the agency. Large-language models (LLMs) could offer “more legible” answers and help the government “keep up” with ATIP requests, McKelvey said.
There are already efforts underway to develop LLMs for this purpose. Enterprise AI developer Cohere recently outlined its vision for deploying AI to process ATIP and similar freedom of information requests. It claimed that AI tools can handle these “repetitive, rule-based” demands, and can fetch and redact documents across multiple systems “much faster” than humans.
AI could also help the Commissioner navigate an “opaque landscape” for elections where AI-generated content (in turn moderated by social media platforms using AI) is a growing problem, according to McKelvey. The OCCE already considered this an issue during the 2025 federal election, as the CBC obtained a briefing note prepared for the Commissioner warning that the vote would “probably generate complaints” about deepfakes and other uses of AI that could violate the Canada Elections Act.
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There are potential challenges to adopting AI at the OCCE, including its legality in areas like privacy and copyright. McKelvey noted to BetaKit that AI’s lawfulness hasn’t been settled in Canada. Both the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the RCMP cracked down on Clearview AI’s data scraping over concerns its mass image gathering for facial recognition purposes violated Canadians’ privacy. Major Canadian news organizations, meanwhile, sued OpenAI in November last year for allegedly training its large-language model on copyrighted content without permission. In February, news publishers also sued Cohere for the same.
Industry leaders and academics, including LawZero co-founder and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, have pushed for laws to fight deepfakes. This includes proposed penalties for deepfake-based election manipulation, numerous forms of fraud, and nonconsensual pornography.
The Commissioner has the advantage of a “niche subset” mandate that narrows its focus, McKelvey added. However, he warned that the office still needs capacity to address problems and might even be “stymied” by big tech providers expanding their AI media generation capabilities.
The professor said he believes we will not see significant AI usage by Elections Canada itself, arguing in the interview that the technology shouldn’t be “anywhere near voting.” However, he stressed that it wasn’t too early for the Commissioner to embrace AI as it races to fight bad actors.
“There already is an [AI] arms race,” McKelvey said.
Update 8/14/2025: The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, not OCCE, was involved in taking action against Clearview AI. The story has been updated accordingly.
Feature image courtesy Element5 Digital on Unsplash.