A former Ontario Power Generation employee who posted a video on YouTube exposing a vulnerability of a nuclear power plant, while offering to provide sensitive information to international terrorists, has been found not criminally responsible of violating Canada’s laws against leaking state secrets.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Jill Cameron made the determination on Thursday in Oshawa after forensic psychiatrists for both the Crown and defence agreed that James Mousaly could not be held legally culpable. Mr. Mousaly, 38, had been facing a potential life sentence after he was charged under the rarely used Security of Information Act. The law prohibits the sharing of classified information, including inside knowledge of nuclear plants.
In an agreed statement of facts entered into evidence in court, the psychiatrists found that Mr. Mousaly suffers from bipolar disorder and has “grandiose delusions.”
Mr. Mousaly’s case has now been diverted from a criminal court to a provincial mental-health assessment tribunal, which will figure out whether to keep him detained, his lawyer Tom Balka said in an interview. An assessment hearing is expected to take place by the end of November. Mr. Mousaly remains in custody, Mr. Balka said.
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Ontario Power Generation, an electricity producer, hired Mr. Mousaly in 2015, but revoked his credentials in December, 2023, and directed him not to attend at any workplace site, according to the agreed statement of facts.
On Jan. 30, 2024, he livestreamed a 22-minute YouTube video from his home that “provided instruction on how to cause damage to nuclear power plants locally and globally,” and offered to provide classified information “to any foreign entity (including Russia, Ukraine, Israel or Palestine) or terrorist group, if they reached out to him,” according to the statement.
Mr. Mousaly showed his OPG credentials and pass in the video, and said, “If you want to destroy this plant because you’re a ... maniac, I will tell you” and “I have offered my help to ... any terrorist or any non-terrorist organization.”
The agreed statement says Mr. Mousaly revealed some secrets involving “vulnerabilities of an Ontario Power Generation nuclear power plant” by telling his YouTube viewers details that are not known to the general public.
An OPG manager notified a security investigator for the utility company about the video the evening it was posted. The investigator contacted the police the next day. Authorities strove to pull it down, but by then it had disappeared from the internet.
One day after Mr. Mousaly posted the video, he was apprehended under the Mental Health Act and put into a psychiatric facility. After he was released, RCMP national-security squad detectives arrested him at his home on Feb. 9. 2024.
Mr. Mousaly was charged with one count of intentionally and without lawful authority communicating safeguarded information to a foreign entity or terrorist group. Prosecutors had no information that Mr. Mousaly was ever actually in contact with malicious actors abroad, according to the agreed statement.
Mr. Mousaly posted hundreds of videos on his YouTube account and had more than 7,000 subscribers, the agreed statement says.
The case against Mr. Mousaly was to be supported by senior OPG security officials who told police that the information revealed on YouTube was sensitive. “Such information would allow an adversary to optimize an attack on a nuclear power plant in Canada or abroad,” these officials told police, according to the agreed statement.
But this year, the court was presented with two psychiatric reports attesting that Mr. Mousaly is unfit for criminal trial.
Dr. Lisa Ramshaw of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, who provided an assessment for the defence, found that Mr. Mousaly “suffers from a major mental illness, namely bipolar disorder” and that “he was incapable of knowing that his actions were morally wrong.”
The Crown’s expert, Dr. Philip Klassen, agreed.
“Mr. Mousaly was clearly accelerated, disorganized, and held grandiose delusions,” he said in his July, 2025, report. “I would submit that a finding of not criminally responsible due to mental disorder is available to Mr. Mousaly.”