Industry and Technology Committee on June 18th, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

This meeting is called to order.

Good morning, everyone.

Happy last day. Knock on wood, but I believe we are on the precipice of rising for the summer, and this will be our last industry committee meeting. Toward the end of the meeting, I'll have a few things to say about that and about what we have to look forward to in the fall.

To begin, I can confirm that all audiovisual checks have been completed and that everything is fine.

Welcome to Mr. Housefather, Mr. Bains and Monsieur Ste-Marie, who are joining us virtually today.

Colleagues, we have been undertaking, as you know, a study on fraud. Today will be the last hour we've dedicated to that study.

Joining us from Google Canada is Jeanette Patell, the director of government affairs and public policy for Canada.

Ms. Patell, you have up to five minutes for your opening remarks, after which there will be a line of questioning from members of the recognized political parties around the table.

With that, I will turn the floor over to you, Ms. Patell.

[Jeanette Patell, Director, Government Affairs and Public Policy, Google Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to speak before you today.

My name is Jeanette Patell. I'm the director of government affairs and public policy for Google Canada. At Google, our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Keeping our users safe is foundational to that mission.

Financial fraud and scams exploit people and undermine the trust that is essential to the digital ecosystem. This society-wide challenge has grown in scale and complexity, with global fraud losses estimated at nearly $580 billion for 2025, according to Nasdaq's “Global Financial Crime Report”. This is driven by sophisticated transnational criminal operations that combine online and offline methods.

At Google, keeping our users and partners safe is our top priority. To tackle this global problem at scale, we've invested for over two decades in advanced technologies, robust policies, legal action and expert teams dedicated to protecting the users of our products and services. Our interventions have significantly improved with our latest innovations in AI, specifically our Gemini-powered tools. While our teams have long used advanced AI to identify and stop scammers, Gemini takes that work even further. Our models analyze billions of signals, including account age, behavioural cues and campaign patterns, to stop threats before they reach people. Gemini's superior understanding of intent also allows us to spot malicious content and pre-emptively block it, even when it's designed to evade detection. The impact speaks for itself. In 2025, Gemini-powered tools helped us catch over 99% of policy-violating ads before they ever served.

We also apply rigorous anti-scam architecture at the device and ecosystem level, on Android and Chrome. Android prevents over 10 billion malicious calls and messages every month, while Google Play Protect, which is active on three billion user devices, scans 200 billion apps daily. On YouTube, tools like AI likeness detection allow public figures to identify and remove deepfakes that misuse their identity for scams. Gmail continues to block 99.9% of spam, malware and dangerous links before they ever reach an inbox.

Google Chrome “safe browsing” protects more than five billion devices worldwide by automatically warning users when they attempt to navigate to dangerous websites or download malicious files. Google makes safe browsing technology freely available to other browsers and Internet companies. It is natively deployed in major competing browsers, such as Safari and Firefox, and operates across diverse operating systems, including iOS and Android. I'm proud to say that the core engineering and continuous development of the Google safe browsing system is driven directly by teams based in our Montreal office. That's Canadian talent working directly on systems that keep billions of users safe around the world.

While these technical defences are robust, no single entity can solve this alone. It's why we helped launch the Global Signal Exchange, expanding to over 1.2 billion shared signals among more than 300 organizations, and we actively provide dedicated reporting channels through our priority flagger program to Canadian financial institutions, law enforcement and such government organizations as the Canadian anti-fraud centre and the Competition Bureau of Canada.

When technical blocks are not enough, we take direct action through law enforcement co-operation and litigation. For example, in December 2025 Google joined a cross-sector intelligence-sharing initiative led by the RCMP. Called Operation Maple Disruption, it led to thousands of disruptive actions being taken against scammers.

In the U.S., we've initiated proactive litigation to dismantle major criminal networks. This includes the Outsider and Lighthouse operations, both phishing-as-a-service networks that distributed “phishing kits” to allow criminals to deploy massive fake text campaigns; and the Darcula syndicate, which stole data from nearly 900,000 credit cards. Our legal action is designed to tackle this challenge at the source and dismantle the core infrastructure of these operations.

Finally, we are committed to empowering Canadians. We are proud to support the Together Against Fraud campaign of the Canadian Anti-Fraud Coalition by providing financial support to amplify its message of awareness. We are also developing workshops specifically for Canadian seniors to help them use AI tools to identify and avoid common online threats. We welcome the upcoming opportunities to work with members of Parliament to raise awareness in their communities.

Google is committed to working as a dedicated partner of the Government of Canada in addressing the challenge of financial fraud and deepfakes. Safe and trusted online environments are not created by accident. They are the result of intentional design, strong management and strong co-operation.

As this committee looks to the future, we believe a national anti-fraud strategy should be built on three core principles: enabling information sharing across the ecosystem, incentivizing proactive community action by digital platforms, and investing in public education.

We look forward to working with this committee to build a safer and more secure digital future for all Canadians.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you very much, Ms. Patell.

Madam Dancho, to start us off, the floor will be yours for six minutes.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Ms. Patell, for being with us today. We greatly appreciate your feedback and also your overview of the work that Google is doing to combat frauds and scams.

I want to ask you about a class action lawsuit that has been filed, resulting from an incident in, I believe, 2025, as reported by La Presse, in which a Quebec woman is alleging she lost more than $30,000 after she clicked on a YouTube advertisement that allegedly had an AI-generated image of our Prime Minister, Mark Carney, advertising some digital currency investment scheme. Ultimately, she lost upwards of $30,000, according to her claims.

I do appreciate that this matter is before the courts. That being the case, I'm not asking you to comment specifically on matters before the courts, of course, but I do believe it raises a broader question that we've been seized with at this committee. Canadians are increasingly encountering AI-generated scams that impersonate public figures, impersonate a CBC news article and the like. I know you're very familiar with this problem. What responsibility do you believe Google and other platforms have—I know you have YouTube in your purview, but there are also Meta and others—regarding scams like this, which end up on your platforms? What responsibility do you have to Canadians in this regard?

[Jeanette Patell]

Thank you for the question.

Situations like this are heartbreaking, obviously, and they really speak to the human cost that criminals are extracting in their targeting of vulnerable Canadians.

When I zoom out and I look at the role that Google plays here, it's one in which we're playing a leadership role, at multiple levels, in hardening our systems through three pillars. I'll just speak to those in a macro sense first.

One is to build products that are safe by design—systems that can prevent, detect and respond rapidly to these types of emerging threats—while working in partnership, because no one can do this alone, to build public education.

However, to speak specifically to this type of issue that we saw, we respond rapidly to improve the ability of our systems to catch this. It's no surprise that, since we're in an adversarial space, criminals constantly attempt to circumvent the protections that we put in place.

We enforce at the front line, but we are also able to respond quickly when we see trends in scams. For example, when we saw an increase in public figure endorsement scams like this, we responded by rapidly deploying a team targeted at that issue, sharpening our detection tools and applying a robust misrepresentation policy. That had real results: We removed 700,000 accounts as a result, and we saw a 90% drop in the reports of this type of scam. What I'm saying is that our responsibility is to ensure that we are strengthening our systems, and we're doing that every day.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

You mentioned that you respond rapidly. If I clicked on a link like this, let's say, and I made an e-transfer from my bank, and we realized it was a scam and my bank reported it to you, how quickly would you remove this scam? If you find out today from Desjardins that there's a scam on your platform, how quickly can you take it down?

[Jeanette Patell]

It's hard to speak to a hypothetical, but we do respond quickly.

I think what you—

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

I'm sorry. I'll just clarify. We had Wealthsimple here, and Wealthsimple mentioned something to the effect that it took four days for Meta to take down a scam that Wealthsimple had reported. Is there an equivalent time frame for Google?

[Jeanette Patell]

It really would be context-dependent. We do work to act rapidly. We've built tools—like the priority flagger program, for example—so that we can accelerate the review of reports of problematic ads by trusted and credible partners, including, for example, the Canadian anti-fraud centre. That would bring them to the front of the queue for assessment.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you.

How is YouTube vetting this? If there's an RBC ad, or a Mark Carney ad or a CBC ad, how are you vetting it to make sure that it is CBC, or that it is the Prime Minister's office or that it is RBC? Do you have a process?

[Jeanette Patell]

We do.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

In this case, it failed, allegedly. I know this has not been proven.

[Jeanette Patell]

I think of this as a multi-layered, multipronged approach. You want to have an “at the front door” protection system, like your security system at the front door, to prevent bad actors from even entering in the first place. That's where we use something we call “advertiser verification”. We apply an onboarding trust assessment. What we're trying to do there is assess the veracity of the actor on our systems and then triage them into either a standard or enhanced verification process. For something like financial services, that is considered a higher-risk sector, so they would go through an enhanced verification process.

In addition to that, we would have our systems working at the back end, constantly analyzing their behavioural signals so that we can understand what the risk profile of this actor is.

There are a whole host of systems that are deployed, including in the onboarding process, to ensure that we have the right people—

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you.

I'm running out of time, so I'll just conclude by saying that it seems to be that each platform has a different system for proving whether it is a legitimate RBC ad, a legitimate PMO ad or whatever it might be. There doesn't seem to be any uniformity. Something we're exploring is whether, perhaps, there should be some uniformity required by government regulation. These are things that we're exploring at this committee, the kinds of recommendations we could make. I'll just leave you to comment or respond, and then I'm out of time. Thank you.

[Jeanette Patell]

We welcome a conversation around things like this: How do you verify advertisers?

I would just offer to this committee that we need to avoid creating a road map for actors to circumvent. That is something that we encounter every day. That is only to say that there needs to be a portfolio of approaches that are dynamic in nature, so that we can use the power of AI to really test the veracity of the types of content that are entering the ecosystem.

This is a conversation that we welcome. There are steps that the Government of Canada can take to enable that, and there are steps that digital platforms can also take to continue to raise the bar.

We see ourselves as a leader in this space. We've been rolling out advertiser verification across 240 countries. We've been doing that proactively. Now, over 90% of advertisers on our systems are verified. That's certainly a conversation we welcome.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you, Madam Dancho.

Madam O'Rourke, I understand that you may be splitting some time with Ms. Begum. I'll leave the two of you to sort that out. Between you, there are six minutes. The floor is yours.

[Dominique O'Rourke, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Terrific. Thank you, Chair.

Thank you for being here, Madam Patell.

We've heard from a number of witnesses that we need an industrial-scale response to these scams, and that it's transnational crime. I can't think of a larger company or one that is more global than Google, which is also, actually, a verb: You're so big, you're a verb.

You talked about the Global Signal Exchange. You participated in Operation Maple Disruption. What is missing? You said we should enable information sharing across ecosystems, that the platform should be proactive, community education.... We're doing those things. What have you seen around the world that Canada should consider adopting to catch that extra 10% of spam ads or fraudulent ads?

[Jeanette Patell]

Thank you for the question. It's such a good question.

I think, even in the question that was posed by Ms. Dancho, one thing that jumped out at me was how many different pieces of information there are, how many different players there would be in any given scam scenario. Google would have a piece of the puzzle, a financial institution would have another piece of the puzzle, but we'd be unable to knit together the full picture without having an opportunity to bring that together. When people talk about the need for information exchange, it is because of this: If you do not aggregate this data in a way that can be meaningful, you have only noise.

The Global Signal Exchange is something that we created just over a year ago. It's still relatively new, but countries like the United Kingdom and Poland are members. What that has enabled is.... Most recently, there was a new case in which the U.K. version of the FBI ingested some content into that system. Google was able to take that, expand our understanding of the threat landscape with that particular case and, under appropriate lawful authorities, share that back with the U.K. As a result, through cross-border collaboration with authorities in west Africa, they were able to take down a major scam operation with tens of thousands of associated accounts. That kind of cross-border collaboration and cross-stakeholder collaboration are essential if we're going to see these types of results.

I would encourage Canada to explore joining the Global Signal Exchange. We certainly want there to be an opportunity for either law enforcement or government to join. I can talk about more areas for partnership and public education, but that's just one example of how it has real results.

[Dominique O'Rourke, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

I have only two seconds. Is data sovereignty the challenge to participating in something like that? Please answer yes or no. I want to cede my time to MP Begum.

[Jeanette Patell]

No, absolutely not.

[Dominique O'Rourke, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Okay.

[Doly Begum, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Thank you so much, MP O'Rourke.

Thank you so much, Ms. Patell, for being here.

It is impressive that Google can remove and block billions of ads before they reach us. You've just mentioned the millions of accounts that were suspended. I'm quite impressed, actually, by the number that you have, in terms of the success rate. I know a lot of them are repeat offenders as well, in terms of those who try to manoeuvre...the ways they come back to the platform.

One thing I am wondering is this: Are there ways you can protect users from getting targeted by the same suspects who keep coming back? That seems to not be part of the way that you have calculated that success rate yet, eliminating or preventing bad actors from even re-entering. That would be my first question.

Secondly, as we're limited in time, I want to ask this: What is the most useful step that our government can take to help platforms like yours help people avoid fraud and scams, given what's going on right now and how perverse it has been?

[Jeanette Patell]

In terms of preventing reoffenders from.... I think of scammers and fraud on our systems. They are abusing our systems. They are toxic to the health of the digital economy, and we are very invested in protecting an operational, trusted digital economy. We are very incentivized to prevent reoffending.

When we look at the success rate.... Circumvention of an account termination is a violation in and of itself. We do everything we are able to do to detect ties to formerly suspended accounts and to understand and map the patterns that are perhaps not apparent to the human eye, so to speak. That is something we are doing to understand linkages between actors and past accounts. That is part of our success, and it includes preventing reoffenders in this space.

The reality is, as with any kind of criminality, that this is a fight without a finish line. We are dealing with sophisticated criminal organizations that constantly adapt and are looking for new opportunities to exploit vulnerabilities and identify new vulnerabilities. Our commitment is to continually invest in these systems.

To answer the second part of the question, about what steps you can take in addition to the partnership—which I would really encourage Canada to explore—public education is really important. We need Canadians to be equipped with the tools, training and resources to be able to identify and avoid scams. A scam is often a journey that they are on. It might not be a single transaction. How can we all be partners in helping them recognize when something is off and support them in getting off that particular track? I'm happy to share how we've done that with a couple of our product designs. Having a much broader remit in terms of the resourcing for public education would be super helpful.

I know we're running short on time, but I would also apply that to law enforcement. Providing resourcing to law enforcement to give them the capabilities and the training to participate in these types of operations will go a long way in supporting the efficacy of what they bring to the table.

[Doly Begum, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

I'm glad that you say that, because we actually have current legislation—