Hour 1 of Ottawa Now for Wed. August 26th, 2026

Chris Holski fills in for the vacationing Kristy Cameron. And as we get closer to Election Season, and when he sees a write-out from a politician, Holski wants to know if it came from them or if that message was at least dictated to a staffer. When we see an image connected with a politician that appears to be real, obviously we’d like to know if it’s real or not. But the proliferation of A.I. on social media – including from politicians – is casting a seed of doubt. What is stopping one from presenting a fake image as real, or an AI-generated text as something they wrote or had their team put together? The answer: Nothing. And that’s the problem. Should Canadian politicians be forced to disclose when they use AI? We dig deeper in Hour 1 with Nathalie A. Smuha, a Law Professor at the University of Toronto. Meantime, as we’ve heard many times on this station, Ontario’s Premier has taken a firm stance against U.S. President Trump. America’s Big Cheese imposed new 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian imports last weekend. But how has Doug Ford’s emotional comments from Monday morning impacted the Ontario PC’s latest polling data? We check in with David Valentin, a Principal at Liaison Strategies. But first, we bring you up to speed on today’s top headlines.