By The Canadian Press

Fact File: Video from Ontario festival misrepresented as anti-immigration march

Feb 17, 2026 | 2:38 PM

A video posted to social media this week claimed to show people at an Ontario winter festival calling for “deportations.” The video of torchbearers marching during the festival is real, but the chanting audio was taken from protests in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The original video shows the crowd talking and laughing, not chanting or protesting against immigration.

THE CLAIM

“‘Deportations’ chants erupt at Ontario winter festival,” reads the caption accompanying a Feb. 15 Facebook reel with around 75,000 views.

The blurry video shows hundreds of torchbearers walking down a residential street. Amid the chatter and laughter of the crowd, some appear to repeat the phrase “get them out” before a woman yells “deportations” and other voices respond “no accommodations,” in a call-and-response repeated several times.

The video caption claims the chants took place at the Cochrane Winter Carnival in northern Ontario on Sunday in response to immigration and rising costs of living in Canada.

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THE FACTS

The Cochrane Winter Carnival is a community event that celebrates winter, and its torchlight parade sees residents walk through the town with torches to light a bonfire.

A Facebook page for the carnival shows the torchlight parade was scheduled to take place last Thursday, not Sunday.

A video shared to a local Facebook group on the evening of the parade matches the one with the supposed anti-immigration chants.

The video, which is of better quality, shows the same torchbearers walking past the same building in the background. The chatter, laughter and sound of dogs barking is the same, but there is no chanting.

The woman leading the “deportations” chant has a British accent, and a keyword search of “UK deportation chant” led to a video of a protest against government plans to house asylum seekers in Crowborough, East Sussex on Feb. 8.

The video contains the same “deportations” and “no accommodations” call-and-response between the woman and the crowd.

A keyword search of “get them out chant” on YouTube brings up a video of an Irish anti-immigration protest from 2024, which has the same cadence as the chant in the torchlight video. The high-pitched whistle from the last second of the YouTube video is repeated in the torchlight video, suggesting the audio may be looped.

Evidence shows the chants were overlaid over the original video, which was a community celebration, not a protest against immigration.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 17, 2026.

Marissa Birnie, The Canadian Press