This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer and appears here with permission.
One morning in October of 2024, Fredericton city councillor Margo Sheppard received an email with the subject line: “The Real Policy Crisis: Prioritizing ‘Nature’ Over People.” It was polished — almost algorithmically smooth — and it calmly urged her to reconsider Fredericton’s net-zero policies.
Over the next month, a flood of similar emails followed, all aimed at getting Fredericton to abandon global climate targets. Sheppard is used to emails from organizations on all kinds of issues, but not this many, not on this issue — and not so well crafted. She grew suspicious.
“If we’re getting them in Fredericton,” Sheppard thought, “councillors all across the country must be getting them too.”
She was right. Thousands of councillors in more than 500 municipalities have received these emails, according to KICLEI, the group behind them, whose name mimics the international environmental network ICLEI. Screenshots of KICLEI’s internal database show the email addresses of local officials nationwide.
An investigation by Canada’s National Observer has now traced the digital infrastructure behind KICLEI’s campaign: a custom AI chatbot designed to express fears about United Nations control using moderate, civic language — messaging that is now shaping real decisions in town halls across Canada.
At least 14 municipal halls have received KICLEI presentations, with Thorold, Ont., already voting to withdraw from Canada’s flagship municipal net-zero scheme, Partners for Climate Protection. This month, Lethbridge, Alberta, voted to cut its governmental emissions reduction target in half. These decisions followed receipt by the town councillors of letters, presentations and reports from KICLEI members. Some of these materials contain misinformation, according to three climate scientists interviewed by Canada’s National Observer.
The consequences for the communities and climate action are significant — but climate plans might be just the first target. These AI-enabled tactics could scale, according to Shane Gunster, an expert in environmental communication at Simon Fraser University, who warned that artificial intelligence “enables the cost of misinformation to come close to zero.”
The chatbot’s instructions tell it to “de-emphasize the climate catastrophe narrative,” to focus on “real pollution, not CO2.” The bot is told to frame these arguments in the most reasonable possible way.
The Canadian Civic Advisor
KICLEI (‘Kicking International Council out of Local Environmental Initiatives’) was founded in 2023 by Freedom Convoy activist Maggie Hope Braun with a singular aim: to convince towns and cities to quit the voluntary net-zero program Partners for Climate Protection, due to its ties to the UN through its co-organizer, ICLEI Canada.
To achieve this, it has created its own custom AI chatbot: the “Canadian Civic Advisor,” powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Internal instructions accessed by Canada’s National Observer show that the chatbot produces tailored scripts, petitions, reports and even speeches for council chambers. The messaging is often framed to resonate with municipal officials’ duty to represent local interests.
The chatbot’s instructions tell it to “de-emphasize the climate catastrophe narrative,” to focus on “practical environmental protection measures” and “real pollution, not CO2.” The bot is told to frame these arguments in the most reasonable possible way, “emphasizing collaboration” and “encouraging diplomacy and mutual understanding between citizens and elected officials.”
One prompt instructs the chatbot to draft critiques of a local Climate Action Plan based on KICLEI’s centralized materials. The latest version is provided with KICLEI’s Substack posts and scientific positions — content that, according to some of the scientists cited, contains climate misinformation.
Output of the Canadian Civic Advisor, shared by Maggie Hope Braun on Facebook with the prompt “Write a letter to the council in Peterborough to withdraw from PCP.”
Many advocacy groups use AI but the potential for it to amplify inaccurate information is “disturbing,” even if real constituents are sending the messages, according to Gunster. He argues that the chatbot allows KICLEI to centralize local messaging and make it maximally persuasive for policymakers.
“You can tailor that communication so specifically to a particular region, to a particular individual, to a particular value set,” said Gunster. It is the first case Gunster has seen of AI being used to target municipal governments in Canada.
KICLEI founder Maggie Hope Braun refused Canada’s National Observer’s interview requests, choosing instead to respond to written questions. She rejected concerns that KICLEI’s chatbot was amplifying misinformation, describing it as “democracy in action.” She explained the chatbot helps citizens who are genuinely concerned about global agendas to “understand local policy and draft respectful, informed communications.”
Braun published her responses online, with reworded versions our original questions.
‘A gross misrepresentation of our work’
Since April 2024, KICLEI has published 172 Substack posts — about one every two days — which are sent to councillors across Canada. Titles include “Extreme Weather Events Are Not Increasing: Separating Fact from Fiction” and “CO2 Is Not the Primary Driver of Climate Change.”
Three prominent climate scientists told Canada’s National Observer that some of these posts contain misinformation about their research.
In March, 2024, Braun gave a deputation to Thorold, Ont.’s city council where she claimed that there is only a 0.3 per cent consensus among climate scientists that humans are the primary driver of climate change. In reality, the consensus is around 99.9 per cent, according to a 2021 review of over 88,000 papers.
The 0.3 per cent statistic is attributed to a 2013 study by John Cook, an expert on climate misinformation at the University of Melbourne, who spoke to Canada’s National Observer from his office in Melbourne, Australia.
“It’s a gross misrepresentation of our work, clearly designed to mislead the public,” Cook said. The figure comes from a widely-debunked paper that he claims distorted his data to “minimize the consensus as much as possible” by counting only studies that used very specific language.
Using this methodology, he argues, “you would say that there’s zero per cent consensus that the Earth is revolving around the Sun.”
Thorold councillors ultimately voted 7–1 to withdraw from the Partners for Climate Protection (PCP) program. Canada’s National Observer covered this decision in a recent investigation into an anonymous oil and gas ad campaign targeting the same town.
The motion to withdraw from PCP was introduced by councillor David Jim Handley, listed as a KICLEI member on Facebook. He described KICLEI’s role in shifting council opinion as “instrumental” and described Maggie Hope Braun as a “catalyst” who guided his thinking.
“You could replicate it, easily,” he said. “You gotta find one city councillor that’s on your side.”
At least 14 other municipalities — primarily in Ontario and Alberta — have received KICLEI presentations. Among them is Lethbridge, Alta., which voted on May 13, 2025, to cut its 2030 operational greenhouse gas reduction target in half. This decision followed a presentation from a KICLEI member, coordinated emails from constituents, and an unrelated staff recommendation.
The scale of KICLEI’s email campaign is even greater. Maggie Hope Braun recently claimed in an interview with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy that KICLEI is sending reports to 8,000 elected officials. Screenshots reveal an internal KICLEI database, packed with the email addresses of mayors, councillors, clerks, and chief administrative officers nationwide.
One of KICLEI’s published reports, “CO2 is not the Primary Driver of Climate Change” cites the work of NASA atmospheric scientist Andrew Lacis on the logarithmic impact of CO2, claiming “this diminishing effect challenges the assumption that rising CO2 levels alone will result in catastrophic global warming.”
Lacis says this is “disinformation.” Far from rising CO2 not being a concern, he explained that CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, causing a “virtually permanent increase” in the Earth’s heat absorption. That drives long-term global warming and may trigger powerful feedback loops which pose “an existential threat.”
The same KICLEI report cites Kevin Trenberth, a prominent climate scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, to claim that “water vapour is far more influential [than CO2] in regulating global temperatures.”
This is not accurate, according to Trenberth: “Water vapour is an important feedback but not a cause or primary driver,” he said. “If there is no CO2 then there is no water vapour.”
In her emailed response to Canada’s National Observer, Braun rejected the concerns of the three scientists, calling them a “disagreement over interpretation.” She denied that KICLEI’s reports contain misinformation or disinformation. “Our references to water vapour, CO2 forcing, and consensus data are grounded in published research,” she said, despite being informed that the authors of those peer-reviewed studies directly contradict her assertions.
A firehose of emails
Councillors in several provinces say they feel overwhelmed by KICLEI’s outreach. Late in 2024 in Simcoe County, Ont., local officials described a “firehose” of correspondence, according to Adam Ballah, policy and communications lead at the Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition.
“It makes their jobs really difficult, having to wade through this stuff,” Ballah explained. In response, he wrote a detailed blog post rebutting KICLEI’s claims.
In one municipality, Tiny Township, a KICLEI deputation told councillors that the costs of the PCP program were “unsustainable.” Alarmed, councillors ordered a review — which found the township was paying $12,700 a year.
Tiny Township has reached Milestone 3 of the PCP program, creating a Climate Action Plan, which gives it access to grants from the Green Municipal Fund. KICLEI estimates that implementing all five milestones costs between $8 million and $212 million dollars, including up to $50 million for a “15 Minute City Model.”
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), which co-organizes the PCP program, did not provide alternative figures when asked directly. Instead, it released a statement from its President Rebecca Bligh, saying “to combat misinformation spread by KICLEI, FCM is proactively communicating results and progress.”
In New Brunswick, Fredericton councillor Margo Sheppard attempted to block incoming KICLEI emails but was advised by the city solicitor that they couldn’t be filtered.
She reported the messages as spam to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) — but never received a response. The CRTC declined to comment on the complaint, or whether they had received it.
“It’s very distressing,” said Sheppard. “I don’t have time in the day to research people who are peddling misinformation or disinformation.”
She was surprised to find out that KICLEI is using AI. “I wouldn’t know how to detect it,” she said.
Whether or not we can detect it, AI has entered the conversation — and local councillors like Sheppard, once peripheral to digital politics, are now on the front lines of a new era of persuasive misinformation.
“This is the beginning,” Sheppard said. “We’re in for a deluge.”
Rory White is an independent investigative journalist who builds technical systems to uncover coordinated campaigns targeting democratic processes. He has contributed to a Bellingcat investigation by geolocating sports betting operations in Russia, and published research analyses in The Lancet Psychiatry and Nature Mental Health. He holds a Masters in Data Science from the University of British Columbia and an M.Sc in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
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