My Canada Includes Slovenia

The Tory message machine is impressive. I’d argue that, at least right now, it’s miles ahead of any other party. Pierre Poilievre and his team are good at creating a simple message, getting it out at rallies across the country, and using the Internet to distribute what they see as the best parts.

Sometimes, Poilievre’s video makers screw up. In mid-August, 2024, they posted a three-minute YouTube video of Poilievre’s speech at the Calgary Stampede. They had a month to work on the short film, but they saved time by combing through stock footage on the Internet. The images, with the leader’s voice-over, were a call to rural white Canadians to support Poilievre. If they supported the man in the tight white T shirt and the white Stetson, they could make Canada into a fantasy place where people appreciated farmers, could be sure their kids were getting a good, non-woke education free of left-wing censorship. They’s be able to celebrate a relative’s long-term sobriety with a family get-together, and feel safe knowing a strong military protected them.

But there were a few problems. The Internet is a world-wide thing. It’s one place that needs more Canada, especially if you’re looking for stock images that you can use without paying.

The ad showed happy people doing nice things. Like grandparents walking in a park with a toddler. That turned out to be Richmond Park, London. (Not the London in Ontario, either.)

“It’s easy to forget what home and hope look like,” Poilievre says in the video. If they hoped to be reminded, they would have been smart to keep scrolling. A neatly dressed little ginger kid sitting at his school desk was filmed in Serbia. A more-adult ginger-blonde student glowing with pride (or something) was filmed at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. The polytechnic is not in Kiev, Saskatchewan, which, unfortunately, is now a ghost town.

This young man looks adoringly at the sky. The next shot shows two fighter planes. “And he looks up, and what does he see? He sees a brand-new fighter jet. They’re doing a training mission in the sky to defend our home and native land, Poilievre says.” The pilots may well have been defending their home and native land, but if they were on a mission, it would have been against Ukrainians. As a spokesman for National Defence minister Bill Blair pointed out, the jets were Russian Su-17 and Su-27 jets. “Shockingly, Mr. Poilievre’s dream for Canada includes Russian fighter jets flying over our glorious Prairies on a ‘training mission,”’ Daniel Minden said in a statement to reporters.

In fact, the Tory leader and the Liberal spokesman might have both been wrong. The SU-27 is a fighter that the Soviets deployed forty years ago and stopped making in 2010. However, the Chinese have been making them under license, and the stock footage was taken from such a long distance that its markings can’t be made out. It might be a Chinese air force plane. The Su-17 is an even older plane. The Russians stopped building them in 1990. They’re still in the arsenal of Poland, Vietnam, Syria and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

That means they’re not much of a threat to the house builders celebrated in Poilievre’s ad. Sharp-eyed Twitter users, able to read the data embedded in the images, found these happy carpenters were working safely in Slovenia. Poilievre said in the video that the builders were using Canadian lumber. Anything’s possible.

The video of a truck driving down a suburban street was shot somewhere in the United States. Contented cattle were grazing on a hill in California when the camera crew showed up. The man in the truck is supposed to have dropped his kid off at school. In the next shot, he’s at a gas station, tanking up on reasonably priced non-carbon-taxed Canadian gas. It’s nighttime. Daylight returns as he drives past what Poilievre describes as a combine. It’s actually a tractor pulling a wagon of rolls of straw in North Dakota.

The entire extended family show up at the end of the day, Poilievre tells the crowd, to celebrate the tenth year of sobriety of one of its members, who was addicted to drugs. Something seems off. Sentient Canadians are unlikely to organize a sobriety dinner where everyone’s holding a big glass of wine. Prairie families, if they were insensitive to the problems of the addicted, are more likely to have a few beers and maybe some whisky. But dinner wine is normal to Tuscan families like the one in the video.

The Stampeders were asked by the Conservative leader to look west to the foothills (shot in Indonesia) and the Rockies (the round mountains in the ad are in Utah). The only scene filmed in Canada was shot at the Kawartha Montessori School outside Peterborough,  Ontario, a few days’ drive from Calgary.  

After the stock imagery was exposed, the Tories took the video off YouTube, but several copies were posted by people who wanted it immortalized. “The video was removed – mistakes happen, as you can see here,” Conservative party spokeswoman Sarah Fischer told reporters. Then she added a stock Conservative responsibility dodge: she said a Liberal ad from 2011 was scrutinized over its use of stock images.

But the Poilievre YouTube video was amateur hour compared to what Donald Trump’s people were doing. The day Poilievre and his ad people were being mocked on social media for making a video showing Californian cows being protected by outdated Soviet fighters, Donald Trump’s campaign was putting out an artificial intelligence (AI) ad showing a digitally created Taylor Swift endorsing Trump. The video also featured cute Swifties happily wearing Trump merch.

In Canada, the Tory screw-up generated some mirth. In the United States, the fake Taylor Swift created real fear, and demands from artists, tech experts and politicians for laws to prevent that level of fakery. Poilievre’s team’s cut-and-paste Canada was laughable. Trump’s computer-generated Taylor Swift and the Swifties was proof that fakery had become dangerous.

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