Justice Minister Sean Fraser's office said the Protecting Victims Act was introduced because victims, survivors and advocates have pushed for Canadian criminal law to keep pace with the ways technology is being used to exploit and harm vulnerable people.Jenny Kane/The Associated Press
As a bill to criminalize non-consensual sexual deepfakes winds its way through Parliament, a Halifax man who used artificial intelligence to make and distribute fake nudes of five young women was acquitted – exploiting a gap in the Criminal Code that legal experts have long urged the government to address.
The democratization of generative AI has led to a proliferation of pornographic deepfakes – images and video of real people, mostly women, doctored to show them naked and sometimes performing sexual acts. It’s a social harm that other countries have already criminalized, and which experts describe as the latest form of technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
“The law does not reflect the technology that exists today,” Justice Bronwyn Duffy wrote in her March 9 decision in Nova Scotia Provincial Court. “… The statute must be revised to respond to such concerns.”
Sharing intimate images without consent has been a crime since 2014. But that doesn’t include sexual deepfakes or fabricated explicit images, as confirmed by Justice Duffy’s ruling, the second judicial decision in six months to reach that conclusion.
In December, 2025, Justice Minister Sean Fraser introduced a bill that would criminalize the non-consensual distribution of explicit deepfakes.
But it wasn’t soon enough for the five Halifax women, whose doctored images constitute an “affront to their sexual integrity,” Justice Duffy wrote.
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The women’s identities are protected by a publication ban. The accused – referred to by the judge as R.M.K., to protect the complainants’ identities – is a former high-school classmate who was enrolled in an international baccalaureate program with the complainants.
Several years after graduating high school, R.M.K., who was not friends with the women, collected fully clothed images of them from social media and used artificial-intelligence software to make them appear nude, according to the agreed statement of facts. He then circulated the doctored photos of the women amongst them between late 2023 and early 2024.
“The subject matter involved the most private of personal attributes – nude images, with up-close, realistic, easily visible breasts and genitalia, imposed on the real faces of these complainants,” Justice Duffy wrote in her decision. “Such images strike at the core of individual dignity.”
In March, weeks after the judge’s decision, Mr. Fraser referenced the Halifax case as an example of the gap in the Criminal Code. He was speaking during a parliamentary justice committee meeting for Bill C-16, which would also establish a clear definition of femicide, among other measures.
“It was not that the act was not heinous or morally culpable,” he said. “It was because the definition of intimate images in the Criminal Code does not include those that are created through the use of artificial intelligence.”
In a statement, Mr. Fraser’s office said Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act, was introduced because victims, survivors and advocates have pushed for Canadian criminal law to keep pace with the ways technology is being used to exploit and harm vulnerable people. The statement called it “one of the most consequential updates to Canada’s Criminal Code in a generation.”
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Bill C-16 was sent back to the House for report on May 6, after what Jeremy Bellefeuille, a spokesman for Mr. Fraser, described as “months of Conservative delays.”
“We expect Parliament to treat it with the urgency it deserves and pass it swiftly so it can move to the Senate,” Mr. Bellefeuille said. “Every delay means more victims and survivors are left without the stronger protections they deserve.”
Still, for nearly a decade, advocates have been calling for changes to legal definitions to ensure non-consensual sexual deepfakes were included, said Suzie Dunn, an assistant professor at the Schulich School of Law.
“Whenever a new social harm comes, it takes time for the law to respond, but I think they could have addressed this,” she said. “... It’s a really simple thing to create a law around, so I think the government could have responded earlier.”
Prof. Dunn said she has advocated on behalf of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund for government to address the issue, and in 2024 published a paper in the McGill Law Journal calling for legal action on deepfakes. She said Canada lags behind other countries when it comes to outlawing sexual deepfakes.
Australia criminalized deepfakes in 2024, the United States followed suit in 2025 and a new law came into force in Britain earlier this year.
Prof. Dunn said the situation is part of a continuing issue of “problematic ideas around sexual entitlement towards women’s bodies and permissive sexual violence that exists in our culture.”
Since the end of 2022, when ChatGPT and generative AI became widely available, creating deepfake images has become easier and increased the possibilities for abuse, said Emmanuelle Vaast, professor of information systems at McGill University and Desautels Chair in digital technology management.
“Deepfakes are, in a way, the latest generation of cyberstalking,” Prof. Vaast said.
She said criminalizing non-consensual sexual deepfakes is a step in the right direction, but platforms also need to take responsibility to try to limit their creation and distribution.
Last October, a man was acquitted in provincial court in Burlington, Ont., after being accused of digitally manipulating a photo of his wife to make her look naked and sending it via Snapchat to an unknown man.
These acquittals and subsequent media reports indicating deepfakes aren’t illegal are problematic, Prof. Dunn said. The professor said they promote permissive norms around creating non-consensual pornographic content – which is easy to make and often free.
“More than anything, that’s the thing that concerns me,” she said. “We don’t have clear messaging from our government through law that these are absolutely socially unacceptable behaviours, and that they’re going to prioritize the sexual autonomy of people over the horny expressive rights of people who are creating this content.”
R.M.K., now 25, the Halifax man acquitted of non-consensual sharing of intimate images, was also charged in the same court file for the criminal harassment of six women, including one he made a sexual deepfake of, and sending an obscene photo of himself holding his erect naked penis, according to court documents. He pleaded guilty last year and will be sentenced July 20.
With a report from Colin Freeze