On February 1, when U.S. President Donald Trump first announced plans to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian goods, IROs at Canadian companies faced a hard choice: address a nightmare scenario that might not come to pass – or wait for more clarity.
Convinced that “offence is the best defence,” Valerie Roberts, Vice President, Capital Markets, for Calgary-based Parkland Corporation, began contacting investors and sell-side analysts in an effort “to make sure that rumours didn’t start spreading.”
Roberts felt vindicated in her approach after anti-Buy American sentiment spurred a social media campaign urging consumers to boycott Chevron stations. While Chevron is an American brand, stations in British Columbia and Alberta are operated by Parkland, which is a Canadian company. “We activated a social media and local media campaign to correct that misinformation,” she explains.
In scenarios like this, speed matters. “If you get any whiff of misinformation or a rumour, it’s best to be proactive and start the phone calls and emails to your largest shareholders and sell-side analysts,” says Roberts. “You need a finely oiled plan.”
Even with whipsaw-fast news cycles, the fundamental rules for a good IR program still apply, says Janet Craig, Vice President of Investor Relations at Maple Leaf Foods.
Craig has found that today’s rumours are not so different from the rumours of yesteryear. Several years ago, as an IRO at a semiconductor company, a key part of Craig’s job was listening for rumours coming out of Asia that might signal a kink in the semiconductor supply chain. She recalls closely reading DigiTimes, a news outlet that tracked industry rumours, because these rumours – true or false – could move semiconductor stocks up to 20% in a day.
Based on years of IR experience, Craig advises her colleagues to perform risk analyses early.
“You really need to be prepared,” she says. “Most of the things happening today aren’t surprises.”
Understanding Deepfakes and AI
One new wrinkle on the old rumour mill is ‘deepfakes,’ or videos in which a person’s voice and/or face and body have been digitally altered for the purpose of spreading false information more convincingly. Deepfakes are deliberately designed to flout the old mantra that ‘seeing is believing’ and to convince investors of scenarios that would seem incredible without some corroboration.
For investor relations folks, the most immediate risk posed by deepfakes is “the direct targeting of your investors to deceive them for some kind of fraud or scam,” says David Shipley, CEO of Beauceron Security in New Brunswick.
Although deepfakes targeting investors are not yet a major problem, Shipley is convinced that this is an area to watch closely. He argues that because scammers search for people with high net worths (think investors) and exploit relationships built on trust (think IROs and their investors), the ingredients are there for future trouble.
One of the most chilling examples of a deepfake attack occurred in early 2024 when an employee of a multinational firm based in Hong Kong paid US$25 million to a scammer who used deepfake technology to pose as the company’s London-based chief financial officer during a video conference call.
Fortunately, scenarios like this are exceedingly rare.
More common are scammers attempting to alter a professional’s voice and image to promote a crypto- or unregulated investment scheme, says Molly Reynolds, Partner and Privacy Practice Lead at Torys LLP in Toronto.
Reynolds advises IROs at public companies to listen online and act swiftly to have anything that manipulates the voice or image of a company representative taken down.
In addition, she emphasizes the importance of anticipating (and preventing) problems before they mushroom. Here, a best practice would be buying up online handles with names resembling a company’s own.
“It’s easy to be fooled by compelling fakes nowadays,” says Reynolds. “And if the social media that’s posting a convincing video is only one letter off from the organization’s actual handle, it’s harder for people to flag that as misinformation.”
Meanwhile, Chris Makuch, Senior Director at Notified, urges IROs to educate themselves on deepfakes and other cyber issues rather than leaving these topics to the discretion of IT professionals.
“IT is sometimes making decisions about how information appears on a website. Even when we’re talking about things that are 100% investor-focused, decisions don’t always live with the investor relations officer anymore,” he says. “IR has to make sure that the C-suite understands that while some things might be IT-driven, they have to be investor-focused, too.”
Activism in a Social Media Age
Unlike with deepfakes, IROs have much more experience facing down activists and agitators promoting their own agendas, sometimes by distorting a company’s record.
Although responsibility for responding to activists is not a new hat to wear, IROs are retooling their tactics to counter people harnessing social media and other digital communications to advance their own agendas.
Starting in late 2023, for instance, Parkland Corp. was targeted by New York-based activist Engine Capital and the company’s largest shareholder, Simpson Oil, and asked to refresh Parkland’s Board and/or put the company up for sale. In a scenario like this, says Roberts, “you don’t want things to fester.” She notes that her CEO and CFO were quick to clear their schedules and initiate conversations with the company’s largest shareholders.
[Since the interview with Roberts took place, news outlets suggest that Parkland may again be looking at putting itself up for sale.]
For IROs, speed is more essential than ever. In this new environment, IR needs to work behind the scenes, prepping the C-suite for a vigorous communications campaign.
“Where IR can help in a quick-response situation is by streamlining the message, boiling things down to the three key takeaways you want people to leave with when they finish a conversation,” says Roberts.
Equally important, she says, is making sure that any “message or rebuttal is delivered consistently. What makes a message credible is keeping it simple and saying the same thing every time.”
She also emphasizes that in activist situations, it’s important to energetically communicate positive stories about the company to create a more balanced overall account for stakeholders to consider.
Anti-Greenwashing
In the case of ESG communications, Canadian IROs are not so much struggling against misinformation from outside actors but are instead doing some soul-searching about the information they themselves provide.
On June 20, 2024, Bill C-59, sometimes informally referred to as the ‘anti-greenwashing rule,’ became law. The new law means that the Competition Bureau can investigate a company if it makes a false, misleading, or unsubstantiated environmental or social claim.
In the wake of C-59, “quite a number of companies have pulled their public sustainability disclosure, across the board. Some did it publicly, and some did it not so publicly,” says Conor Chell, Partner and National Leader of ESG Law in KPMG’s Calgary office.
In a survey by KPMG, 75% of Canadian CEOs said that they had no plans to change their ESG strategies but that they would be altering how they talk about environmental and social topics, explains Chell. As areas to revisit, he cites carbon neutrality and Net Zero goals.
“Making those claims or setting those targets isn’t prohibited. But when tested, you have to be able to prove those claims are accurate and achievable,” he says.
Time for a New Communications Plan?
While IROs are always striving to get a clear message across, they now face some legitimate questions about how to communicate in an age of AI and disinformation.
“Creating short messages, soundbites, and clips” makes sense in order to be heard by individuals who lack the attention spans to wade through lengthier analyses, but briefer, zingier communications are easier to misunderstand or manipulate, says Torys’ Reynolds. For this reason, she urges IROs interested in communicating more succinctly to refer their audiences to authoritative sources.
Also reshaping IR communications is the increasing presence of AI chatbots as a “new audience” for the information that senior management and investor relations professionals convey, says Maple Leaf’s Craig. In an era when transcripts from quarterly conference calls and other IR presentations are being screened by AI bots for ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ words and phrases, IROs face a dilemma.
Craig notes that “some companies are starting to review their conference call transcripts to screen for positive or negative words, knowing these trends will be picked up by AI screens.”
While Craig believes in experimenting with AI to understand how it works, she is not willing to rewrite communications in a way that’s likely to be more favourably viewed by AI bots. She notes that her buy-side colleagues complain that corporate messaging is already “too generic,” and she is concerned that altering language for AI screens would make that problem worse.
Both Craig and Parkland’s Roberts believe that the current communications environment calls for companies to double down on the tried-and-true fundamentals of investor relations. Creating strong and consistent communications about your company continues to be one of the most effective strategies in any IRO’s toolbox.
More than anything else, though, IROs need to strengthen their relationships with stakeholders – an area in which the profession’s brightest lights have always excelled.
One key aspect of investor relations is building trust, and results from Edelman’s latest trust barometer, released in early 2025, show that Canadian businesses are doing a fairly good job – with 55% of Canadians trusting business, as compared to 50% trusting government.
“Well-established relationships with the buy-side and sell-side are key,” concludes Roberts. She continues: “I find that a lot of investors and analysts will reach out to us for confirmation before they begin to spread misinformation. And that’s what you really want.”