Fires & resignations
Ontario: fires & resignations
Crisis watch: AI just cloned a well known thinktank. Is your crisis plan ready?
ICYMI: Saeed’s take on the keys to a perfect lobby day
But first… here’s what we’ve been up to this week:
On Friday, Val attended Breakfast with the Premier and MPP Nolan, where the Premier talked energy (nuclear investment to meet growing electricity demand), critical minerals, and transit expansion, plus the role of US partnerships in selling Ontario's resources.
On Wednesday, Paige attended the CDA Institute's roundtable on net-zero defence capability, where speakers from IRPP, RMC, the CAF, and TKMS covered dual-use investment, SME pathways into defence supply chains, and clean tech's role in readiness.
1. Ontario: fires & resignations
On Friday, MPP Stan Cho resigned from cabinet as tourism, culture and gaming minister, days after it was revealed that he had billed taxpayers $16,203 in Toronto hotel stays since 2023 (including roughly $11,700 last fiscal year) while representing Willowdale, a few kilometres from the legislature. Premier Ford called the claims "totally unacceptable”. Sport Minister Neil Lumsden is also retiring August 4, so we’re watching for a rumoured shuffle.
The bigger emergency is in the north. Emergency Preparedness Minister Jill Dunlop filed a formal Request for Assistance with Ottawa, including possible Canadian Armed Forces deployments, to speed evacuations as more than 180 fires burn and 15 communities evacuate or prepare to. Collins First Nation has been largely destroyed, with over 30 homes, a school, and community centres gone. NDP Leader Marit Stiles went at Ford directly in a video posted Wednesday, saying he let the wildland firefighting force shrink year after year and ignored climate commitments; the province budgeted $150 million for emergency firefighting this year after spending $271 million last year.
Selvam Insights:
If you have files in front of Tourism, Culture and Gaming (gaming, attractions, agencies, cultural funding): your minister just changed and Doug Downey holds the file on an interim basis. Re-map your contacts before the shuffle lands, and expect decisions to slow until it does.
If you're in aviation, logistics, emergency services, or camp and remote operations: the federal Request for Assistance opens contracting for evacuation air support, accommodation, and recovery. Northern recovery money will follow this season; position with Emergency Preparedness and Indigenous Services now, not after the RFPs post.
If accountability is your risk surface (agencies, boards, anyone spending public money): expense scrutiny is now the story of the summer and it will not stay confined to MPPs. Get your disclosures clean before a reporter or an opposition researcher does it for you.
2. Crisis watch: AI made impersonation cheap. Is your crisis plan ready?
This week the Macdonald-Laurier Institute confirmed that an organization linked to a hostile foreign intelligence service cloned its entire website by changing one letter off the real address, complete with matching email addresses.
The institute's own infrastructure was never touched and the crisis arrived anyway. AI has collapsed the cost of crisis: cloning a full website, generating fluent outreach in an organization's voice, faking an executive on video or a phone call now takes hours, not a state budget.
For any organization with a reputation worth borrowing, this is the new crisis category. The old playbook assumed the crisis starts inside your walls. Impersonation crises start outside them, in your name, and you may be the last to know.
Start with the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario's breach response steps: contain, investigate, assess the harm, notify, report, the same sequence privacy lawyers walk their clients through.
Selvam Insights:
If a deepfake or cloned site surfaced tomorrow, could you respond in an hour? Pre-draft the holding statement, decide now who verifies, who calls the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and law enforcement, and who tells clients, because the gap between discovery and your first credible word is where the damage compounds.
If your executives are visible (podcasts, panels, earnings calls): their voice and face are training data. Set internal verification callbacks for any request involving money or credentials, and brief the people most likely to be imitated. We run impersonation and deepfake crisis simulations; the organizations that rehearse this are the ones that keep control of the story.
If your brand carries authority (advisory firms, associations, research bodies, anyone government-adjacent): monitor for it. Register the obvious lookalike domains, set alerts for near-miss URLs and spoofed executive profiles, and give staff and clients one canonical rule about how you do and don't make contact.
3. ICYMI: Saeed’s take on lobby days
“Some lobby days fail before anyone books a flight.
That's because someone picked a date off a regular calendar instead of the parliamentary one. The House of Commons runs on its own clock. Ignore it and you'll host great meetings... in empty rooms.
Here are 5 rules that make or break your lobby day:
1. Wednesday is caucus day. Parties hold national caucus that morning, which makes Wednesday the fullest day of the week on the Hill. It's also why the chamber doesn't convene until 2 PM. It's harder to book MPs before noon.
2. Question Period is sacred. 2:15 to 3:00, Monday through Thursday. Do not book.
3. Vote timing changed in 2023. Recorded votes used to happen at 5:30 PM. Now they're held right after Question Period, around 3:15, with bells that run until about 3:45. That means the unbookable stretch of the afternoon is 2:00 to 3:45, and a meeting scheduled for 3:15 will die waiting for the bells.
4. A minister's calendar is the scarcest real estate on the Hill, and requests routinely get routed to political staff. Book the parliamentary secretary, whose job description includes meeting delegations on the minister's behalf, and pursue a confirmed 15-minute reception drop-by instead of a speculative meeting.
5. Always book a staffer as your backup. If a vote is called and an MP has to leave mid-meeting, the staffer stays and you still get heard by the person drafting the policy.
The Standing Orders are public. Some organizations and surprisingly, some firms, never read them before picking a date.”
