I started in journalism during a different era for the industry, a time when reporting meant lugging huge cameras and other heavy equipment through airports to war zones and other flashpoints around the world. I was the reporter viewers saw on screen, authoritatively telling stories for Global News, ABC, CNN and Al Jazeera, working from Cairo, Addis Ababa, Port-au-Prince, Gaza and elsewhere.

It’s the only job I ever wanted. I would land in a country in crisis, and people would rush to me with questions: Was this ceasefire just a trap? Is our government behind that bombing? Was the other side paying off the UN? Often, I was barely off the plane when people would approach me, hoping I had the information they needed—and that I could confirm the story they wanted to believe.

Over time, I began to see a pattern. In crises, people are starved of trustworthy information, so they fall into camps, each side claiming truth and blaming the other. During my reporting years, I saw it in the Middle East, where media, leaders and people clung to their own national narratives, deaf to the other side. In Afghanistan, the failure of both government and foreign interventions left people with no one to trust at all—and to despair. These crises rarely started with violence. They began with confusion and a lack of information. Trust frayed, institutions faltered and polarization hardened. Once that spiral begins, it’s painfully hard to reverse.

This is no longer someone else’s crisis; it’s Canada’s. For decades, journalists, academics and public institutions, imperfect as they were, acted as guardrails, verifying facts before they reached the public. Today, AI is upending how we access information, and chatbots like ChatGPT are quickly becoming a primary source of information, preferred by many over traditional news. In 2025’s annual CanTrust Index, which polls Canadians on how much they trust certain social institutions, 41 per cent of Gen Z Canadians said they see AI systems as reliable sources of information. That’s nearly the same as the 49 per cent who trust........

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