False: United Nations troops have been flown in to help Canadian police deal with the protests in Ottawa.

By: Laura Vitelli
February 23 2022

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There is no evidence to suggest the presence of United Nations (UN) troops in Canada, despite the presence of a UN aircraft in North Bay airport.False rumors circulating on social media have been speculating that UN troops are involved in police operations to handle the ongoing protests in Ottawa, Canada. Some social media users claimed that officers seen in green uniforms were UN troops authorized to enter the country by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. However, journalists present at the protests stated that these were officers from the neighboring province of Quebec’s police service. Then, on February 19, a woman on TikTok posted a video of herself near Jack Garland Airport in North Bay, Ontario, showing an airplane marked “UN” parked on the airfield. In the video, the woman made a connection between the airplane’s presence in Ontario and the falsely-identified “UN troops”. Canadian aviation photojournalist Tom Podolec shared publicly-available flight records that show that the regional jet at the center of the rumors arrived in North Bay on January 29 after departing from Amman, Jordan on January 28. The online Canadian Civil Aircraft Register (CCAR) database shows that this airplane is owned by a North Bay-based company named Voyageur Aviation. In an email to the Associated Press news organization, Manon Stuart, spokesperson for Voyageur’s parent company Chorus Aviation, stated "I can confirm that the aircraft has been in North Bay for several weeks for a routine aircraft maintenance heavy check event at our Voyageur North Bay facility … Voyageur employs approximately 220 people in North Bay, providing aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul services for a global customer base." It is well-known that the UN is one of Voyageurs’ customers. References to their relationship appear several times throughout the Pilot Frequently Asked Questions page on the Voyageur Aviation website. As such, the TikTok video does not suggest the presence of UN troops in Ottawa, nor anywhere else in Canada.