A VIDEO THAT appears to feature the Canadian Prime Minister announcing a range of restrictions on cars is fake.

The footage appears to show the recently elected leader of Canada Mark Carney saying that all cars made before 2000 will be gradually “phased off Canadian roads due to safety and emission standards”.

In the footage, Carney also appeared to announce bans on window tints and “lifted” trucks that have been modified to sit higher off the road.

The video shows Carney in front of Canadian flags speaking in a particularly jilted cadence.

He says: “Effective June 1, all vehicles manufactured before 2000 will be gradually phased off Canadian roads due to safety and emission standards. Non-compliant window tints, including rear windows, are now prohibited.

“Drivers will have a 14-day grace period to install approved replacements. Lifts and their levels on trucks must be taken off. For not only the owners’ safety, but for the people around. It doesn’t make sense to have a truck jacked in the air. These will be taken very seriously.”

At times, there are long pauses between words, but there are sometimes no pauses at all between sentences. For example, the version of Carney in the video pronounces “replacement-lifts” as one word.

The video has been posted across social media platforms including TikTok, Threads, Facebook, Instagram and X, where just one post featuring the clip has been viewed more than 2,400,000 times.

Carney, who had previously led two countries’ central banks, was elected leader of Canada’s ruling Liberal Party in March this year, after then-prime minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation.

He was constitutionally compelled to quickly hold a reelection, and the following month, he led his party to a victory and secured his own mandate as Prime Minister.

Carney hasn’t been Prime Minister for very long, there aren’t years of his speeches to go through to find obscure, forgotten utterances. In addition, his glitchy speech and twitching movements in the video don’t match with how Carney acts in recorded public appearances since becoming leader of Canada.

Instead, the glitchy speech is typical of what we’d expect from a deepfake video — artificially generated moving images of a real person.

Based on Carney’s suit and background, the clip appears to be a manipulation of a 27 March press conference that was broadcast on the Canadian public affairs channel, CPAC, where Carney described the Canadian response to US tariffs.

However, while the 32-minute broadcast did feature one mention of cars, it was not about restricting them.

“We’re changing our federal procurement,” Carney said. “We’re only going to buy Canadian cars: 40,000 vehicles.”

That video was also said to have been filmed at a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the home to Canada’s federal government. This makes it even more unlikely that there are no news reports from reliable sources of Carney announcing a dramatic ban on pre-2000 cars. Nor are there any videos on the CPAC channel that match the clip shared online.

The Canadian government does in fact have plans to change how its citizens drive, setting a target for all vehicles sold in 2035 to be electric, hybrid, or to run on hydrogen.

These plans were announced before Carney became Prime Minister, and were widely publicised at the time.

This is because, unlike the manipulated clip where Carney appears to be banning pre-2000 cars from driving on Canadian roads, the plans to sell only electric cars in Canada by 2035 is real.

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