MK-ULTRA in Canada is the Canadian dimension of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA programme, addressed by John Kiriakou on 19 November 2025 after the host raised a newly authorised class action in Montreal.
The occasion
The lawsuit was brought by a woman born in 1942 who was sixteen in 1958, and who — in the account put to Kiriakou — was sent by a judge into the care of the programme’s Canadian administrator after being treated as a delinquent. The administrator, the host noted, has long since died.[1]
Kiriakou’s confirmation
Kiriakou did not hedge on whether it happened. “We know with 100 per cent certainty that many of the MK-ULTRA experiments took place in Canada.”[2]
Asked why, his answer was administrative rather than conspiratorial. “We asked the Canadian intelligence service to help us out. This was all anti-Soviet, anti-Chinese — you know, remote viewing and LSD and all that stuff — and they gladly helped.”[2]
Not for deniability
The host offered the explanation most people reach for: that Canada was chosen because it was remote enough to give the agency plausible deniability. Kiriakou rejected the premise before the sentence finished. “We mostly did it at home.”[2][3]
The correction matters to how the programme is understood. In Kiriakou’s telling Canada was not an offshore laboratory chosen to put distance between the agency and its subjects; it was an allied service that agreed to participate in work the CIA was already conducting on its own citizens. The framing offered to the Canadians — that this was Cold War research against Soviet and Chinese capabilities — is the same framing that carried the programme domestically.
The programme he sketches around it
Asked to describe MK-ULTRA for viewers who did not know it, Kiriakou gave the outline he uses consistently: “it was a top secret CIA program from 1955 — the origins were 1952 — up to 1975, when they were caught by the Church Committee. And so what they did was things like they experimented on American citizens without their knowledge, by dosing people with LSD.”[3]
The Canadian question is therefore not a separate scandal in his account but a jurisdictional footnote to the same one — with the distinction that the victims in Montreal are suing, and the American ones largely never could.