TORONTO — Daniel Dale is Canada’s most famous fact-checking journalist. He’s also one of Canada’s only fact-checking journalists. And therein lies a tale of politics, media, and some key differences between the United States and Canada.

Dale was born in Toronto, graduated with a business degree from York University, and made his way into journalism. He was hired by the Toronto Star in 2008, where, among other things, he would cover the late, troubled, larger-than-life Toronto mayor, Rob Ford. Eventually Dale was dispatched to be the Star’s correspondent in Washington, D.C.

After Donald Trump began his first presidential run in 2015, Dale found himself intrigued by Trump’s numerous, less-than-accurate claims in his public appearances. In addition to his regular articles as a foreign correspondent, Dale began tweeting lists of false things Trump had said during his campaign rallies. Dale’s posts quickly caught on, especially among Americans during the 2016 election.

CNN’s Daniel Dale in Toronto. (Louis Jacobson/Poynter)

Dale’s editor at the Star, Ed Tubb, worked with him to regularize his Trump fact-checking on the newspaper’s website and weave it into his overall coverage. Dale and Tubb focused on Trump’s clearest, most obvious falsehoods as a way of highlighting how different he was as a politician, Tubb recalled.

The pair created a running database of Trump’s questionable claims that eventually numbered in the thousands. “It was never his sole day job, but it did become more of one for him,” Tubb said. In metrics like pageviews and time spent on the site, Dale’s work “was always at the top of the charts,” Tubb said. And when it came to selling the project to the Star’s higher-ups, Tubb said, “I never had any trouble.”

Then, in 2019, CNN came calling, and like countless Canadian professionals before him, Dale headed to the vastly larger U.S. market. For the rest of Trump’s first term, and now in Trump’s second term, Dale has become a familiar on-air presence, holding Trump accountable for his statements for a U.S. audience.

Back in Canada, the Star has periodically revived fact-checking journalism, including during Canada’s 2021 federal elections and other political coverage.

But as a Canadian fact-checking journalist, Dale has been a unicorn. As I was reporting this article in Toronto and elsewhere, one observation came up repeatedly: Fact-checking in Canada is ad hoc. Here, there is no equivalent of PolitiFact, the dedicated fact-checking website where I am chief correspondent, or FactCheck.org. Nor is there a dedicated political fact-checking position at a major media outlet, like the one Glenn Kessler held at The Washington Post until recently or that Linda Qiu holds at The New York Times.

One recent example from when I was in the country: On Feb. 9, Trump used a social media post to assail an almost-ready-to-open bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. The controversy attracted wide coverage in the Canadian media, but mostly as a news story or as fodder for opinion pieces. I found just one article by a Canadian-owned outlet labeled as a fact check — by CTV, a for-profit broadcaster — and it was written by a regular anchor and reporter for the network based in Windsor, not a fact-checking specialist. The French news service Agence France-Presse, well regarded in international fact-checking circles, also published a fact check.

Naturally, Dale filed a fact check for CNN and its U.S. audience.

Dale’s rise benefited from an unusual set of circumstances. Not only did he have a special knack for fact-checking and social media, but in Trump he found a subject who made more questionable claims than anyone — certainly anyone in Canada.

Some Canadian politicians — such as Ford or his brother Doug, Ontario’s provincial premier — have superficial stylistic similarities with Trump, notably their rough outspokenness. But analysts here say the range and degree of falsehoods in the Ford brothers’ rhetoric have hardly compared to Trump’s. “It’s impossible to think of a precedent” for Trump among Canadian politicians, Tubb said.

Ed Tubb, an editor at the Toronto Star, at its newsroom in Toronto. (Louis Jacobson/Poynter)

So Dale’s departure to a U.S. media outlet was likely preordained. “Being next to the U.S., so much of the information environment is influenced by the U.S.,” Tubb said. “To have the only full-time English-language fact-checker being someone covering Trump — it feels very ‘Canadian media.’”

Other fact-checking efforts in Canada

Canada may lack specialized fact-checking journalists, but it does have a lively sector adjacent to it.

At McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, the Digital Society Lab is exploring a variety of emerging technologies, such as using machine learning to model the flows of misinformation on social media platforms, said Clifton van der Linden, a political scientist and academic director of the lab. This follows previous work on health misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic.

“There are not enough supercomputers to run every post through them,” said John McAndrews, the lab’s managing director. “So one approach is to say we need to have data reduction earlier in the pipeline, to make the rest of the pipeline more efficient.”

The lab has also spearheaded a promise tracker, covering not only Canada’s prime minister but also its provincial premiers.

Clifton van der Linden and John McAndrews of the Digital Society Lab at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. (Louis Jacobson/Poynter)

The Canadian Press, a wire service, is a member of Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network; recent fact checks include a mix of debunked social media claims and a fact check of Trump.

Agence France-Presse has fact-checked Canada since mid-2018 from its Montreal bureau, producing material in both English and French. Radio Canada’s Decrypteurs team has been publishing French-language checks on misinformation, and CTV has a segment that aims to educate about digital deception.

A key node of the misinformation-tracking community in Toronto is Craig Silverman, who previously worked for BuzzFeed Canada and ProPublica and who for a while published his column “Regret the Error” for Poynter.

Today, Silverman runs Indicator, an outfit in which he collaborates with Alexios Mantzarlis, the onetime head of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network and a veteran of Google. Indicator provides tools, workshops and training to help professionals navigate and investigate the digital information landscape

Craig Silverman, co-founder of Indicator, in Toronto. (Louis Jacobson/Poynter)

Toronto also serves as a welcoming home for Farhad Souzanchi, the editor of Factnameh, a fact-checking service focusing on claims from and about Iran. The site’s articles are accessible by virtual private networks in Iran and widely read despite government opposition.

“We don’t have any red lines” for covering and debunking claims, Souzanchi said in an interview here. “We have fact-checked the supreme leader, which would be absolutely off limits inside Iran.” In one case, the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had to backtrack on a claim he made after Factnameh debunked his assertion.

One of the newest entries in the misinformation sphere is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s public broadcaster. A year and a half ago, the CBC launched a visual investigations team that uses a combination of open-source investigation, digital forensics and traditional journalism techniques to both support CBC’s regular news coverage and publish articles and projects of its own.

Litsa Sourtzis and Eric Szeto of the CBC News visual investigations unit at CBC headquarters in Toronto. (Louis Jacobson/Poynter)

The unit has debunked an image of accused drug kingpin Ryan Wedding shared by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum as generated by artificial intelligence; calculated that two of Canada’s biggest political parties had exaggerated the size of crowds at their rallies; determined that viral videos a white man complaining about the difficulty of getting a job in Canada were made by AI; and investigated claims about fake “FIFA visas” to Canada for the World Cup. The team’s video breaking down the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis received 8 million views.

In a collaboration with the international investigative outlet Bellingcat and the Danish news outlets TjekDet and Politiken, the CBC team published an expose of a deepfake pornography site called MrDeepFakes. And in collaboration with local journalists, the team has launched a series about white nationalist fighting clubs.

Why classic fact-checking is ad hoc in Canada

With all this ferment for pursuing misinformation — and with Canada’s educated, affluent, information-seeking population — the Canadian media’s ad hoc approach to traditional political fact checking might seem like a mystery, especially when so many American news outlets have adopted the approach. But if you look closer, a few reasons may explain it:

Political campaigns are shorter in Canada. Unlike in the U.S., where campaigning is constant and unending, Canadian campaigns last for a few weeks. So for a Canadian fact-checker, there would be a quick sprint, followed by a need to write about something else … for the next few years. (Observers here say Canadian politicians really do abide by the no-campaigning norm between election periods, to the relief of the public.)

Canadian legacy media outlets are under strain. Having a full-time fact checker (or something close) would be an unimaginable luxury in today’s media climate, observers here said. Headlines about massive layoffs at The Washington Post resurrected unhappy memories in Canada, said van der Linden of McMaster’s Digital Society Lab, but “we’ve seen a lot of headlines like that in Canada.”

Canadians are less tolerant of culture-war division. While Canada certainly has ideological divides, its political rhetoric tends to be more measured. Politics here is mostly practiced within narrower parameters, in part because the electorate includes a sizable share of persuadable swing voters. That makes politicians less likely to appeal to the extremes with questionable claims.

Canadian politicians are more restrained by shame than U.S. politicians are. “One thing I see among Canadian politicians on most levels is a willingness to concede mistakes,” van der Linden said. When a falsehood emerges here, it’s often because of a simple mess-up, and the truth tends to be pretty boring. “We don’t have many Pants on Fire claims here,” Tubb said.

Tubb said his paper is likely to dip back into fact-checking when necessary. But in all likelihood, he added, the pursuit of fact-checking “will continue to be ad hoc.”

Feb. 26, 2026: This article has been updated to include additional material about Agence France-Presse, Radio Canada and CTV.