In my last post, I noted that this CBC article heavily relies on what I call weasel-words, so I figured I’d give you a few examples from it, with the weasel-words emphasized in
bold type:
"These events may be associated with an increased risk of sexual exploitation”.
“[T]he risks to vulnerable people may increase as traffickers adapt their operations to capitalize on the boom in economic activity”.
“Sexual exploitation linked to major events may be facilitated through online advertising on escort platforms”.
There are many more sentences like this in the article. Essentially what they’re saying is:
MAYBE someone MIGHT be at RISK of being exploited. MAYBE.
In finding those examples for this post, I reread the article, and this time I noticed something a bit odd.
The article is ostensibly about how the government agency known as the Financial Transactions And Reports Analysis Centre of Canada” — aka Fintrac — had written a bulletin (released in May) that warned that “vulnerable people" might be more "at risk" of being "exploited by human traffickers” during the FIFA games.
As I said, most of the article is made up of those weasel-word sentences that contain no actual hard information — no names, no numbers, no real journalistic content. The exception is this paragraph:
"The agency says it made 316 disclosures of actionable financial intelligence in 2024-25 to law enforcement agencies in support of their human trafficking investigations. These disclosures identified 538 subjects of interest and supported 26 project-level investigations, the agency says.”
I had speculated in my last post that the purported author of the article — Jim Bronskill — had
not actually written it, but had gotten AI to do the “writing” for him. Rereading that paragraph from Bronskill’s piece, I noted that it begins and ends with the words “the agency says”. That’s awkward writing. So I started to think that maybe AI had
not written this because AI would have done a better job.
But let’s get past whether or not the paragraph is well-written and focus on its content. According to Fintrac, in 2024 and 2025, there were 316 instances of suspicious financial transactions that
might have been related to “human trafficking”. And there were 538 people who were in some way connected to those transactions. Those sound like relatively high numbers, but they only resulted in
26 investigations.
I initially wondered how many of those 26 investigations lead to arrests and convictions. The article doesn’t say. But then it occurred to me that a more relevant question is: How many of those 26 investigations related to major sporting events — after all,
THAT is the purported subject of the article.
Since I was speculating that the article was actually an Artificial Intelligence abridgement of the Fintrac bulletin, I thought that maybe the AI had carelessly left out the relevant information about how many of the 26 investigations had related to major sporting events. As you all know, AI isn’t actually intelligent.
So I decided to take a look at the Fintrac bulletin to see if the information was in there and if the AI had just left it out.
Doing a search, I found the document:
This Special Bulletin supports businesses subject to the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act in recognizing financial transactions associated with human trafficking.
fintrac-canafe.canada.ca
To my surprise, not only does it
not explain how many of the 26 investigations related to major sporting events, but there is
no reference to the 26 investigations
at all. There is also
no reference to the 316 suspicious financial transactions and the 538 transactions-related people.
I double-checked — I definitely had the right document. Other material that Bronskill claims is in the bulletin
IS there.
Bronskill does not explain where the numbers came from (the numbers being 316, 538, and 26). Did he get them from a different Fintrac document or did he actually phone Fintrac and get them from a real human being?
Doing some internet searching, I was able to find Bronskill’s source for the numbers. It
is a different Fintrac document, also from May:
FINTRAC publishes money laundering indicators relating to human trafficking and major international sporting and entertainment events
fintrac-canafe.canada.ca
That document is titled FINTRAC Publishes Money Laundering Indicators Relating To Human Trafficking And Major International Sporting And Entertainment Events. It contains this paragraph:
"In 2024–25, FINTRAC generated 316 disclosures of actionable financial intelligence to Canada’s municipal, provincial and federal law enforcement agencies in support of their human trafficking investigations. These disclosures identified 538 subjects of interest and supported 26 project-level investigations.”
Not only did Bronskill
not explain what his source was, but he also (the shitty journalist that he is) did not use quote-marks to indicate where he was precisely quoting his source.
Both the Fintrac document (the one that mentions the 26 investigations) and the Bronskill CBC article are about the supposed link between major sporting events and “human trafficking”, but
neither explains how many of the 26 investigations into “trafficking” had anything to do with major sporting events. This is
not an accident or carelessness — this is deliberate. I could believe that a journalist like Bronskill (or his AI) might be careless enough to neglect to mention Fintrac’s achievements in this area, but government agencies do
not forget to mention their successes. How many of the 26 investigations related to major sporting events? If the number was
anything above zero, it would be in the document. They don’t tell us what the number is
because the number is zero.
If Bronskill was a good journalist, and not a hack, he would have phoned someone at Fintrac and asked how many of the 26 investigations had anything to do with major sporting events. And he would have noted the answer in his article, but he didn’t.
