Ontario winter carnival footage altered to add anti-immigration chants

"Meanwhile at the Winter Festival in Ontario. 'Deportations, Deportations,'" says a February 15, 2026 post from the conspiracy-laden X account "Concerned Citizen," which has repeatedly peddled disinformation. "Canada, just like every other Western Country, has had mass immigration weaponised against it. Now just like everywhere else - Citizens are starting to rise up."

Similar posts spread across X and Facebook, amplified by conservative commentator Bill Mitchell and other influential accounts. The claim also circulated in Spanish.

The roughly 25-second video shows adults and children walking with torches down a snowy terrain. In the background, the crowd can be heard chanting, "Get them out!" Later, a woman's voice follows with another chant: "Deportation!"

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Screenshot from X taken February 20, 2026

But the clip is altered, with unrelated sounds added to make what local officials said was a non-political event seem like an uprising against immigrants.

Since Canada's long-standing pro-immigration consensus flipped in 2023, AFP has debunked numerous falsehoods about migrants in the North American country.

No chanting

Reverse image searches surfaced what appears to be the original version of the video posted February 12, 2026 to a Facebook group titled, "Cochrane, Ontario Past and Present" (archived here).

"2026 Carnival Torchlight leaving the fire hall. Thank you to all the men and women of the fire dept," says the caption on the 57-second video, uploaded by a user who also shared another shot of the same parade (archived here).

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Screenshot from Facebook taken February 20, 2026

Neither clip features any of the anti-immigrant chanting heard in the manipulated version circulating online.

The Cochrane Winter Carnival is a multiday festival in Ontario that kicks off with a parade in which residents, led by the local fire department, "walk towards Lake Commando with a torch where a large bonfire is lit," the event's official website says (archived here).

According to the carnival's Facebook page, the torchlight parade took place February 12, the same night the original video appeared on Facebook (archived here).

Cochrane Fire Chief Richard Vallee confirmed in a February 19 email to AFP that "the post with chanting is fabricated."

"No such thing happened at the event," he said.

Daniel Gagnon, the town's chief administrative officer, said the town's leadership was "deeply offended and alarmed by the doctored video."

"There were no such chants," Gagnon, who was among the walkers in the parade, told AFP in a February 19 email. "That is patently false."

Some posts spreading the disinformation, he added, inflated the crowd participation to 50,000 people. Cochrane's population is short of 5,400 and the parade consisted of hundreds rather than thousands of participants, he said.

Dubbed audio

Keyword searches for the slogans shouted in the doctored version -- "Get them out" and "deportation" -- surfaced similar audio in outdated and unrelated clips.

The first chant seems to match a 2024 clip from Ireland (archived here). The video was posted on YouTube May 6, 2024, the same day hundreds of anti-immigration protesters swept through Dublin's O'Connell Street.

The second appears to have been lifted from early February 2026 footage of a march in Crowborough, England, in which a speaker called for "deportation" and others responded: "No accommodation" (archived here).

One version of the doctored video circulating online was further manipulated to depict a woman in a blue jacket running toward the camera at the end and shouting: "Deport them all!"

In the original footage, the woman simply walks with the crowd.

AFP has debunked other misinformation about Canada here.