Climate misinformation is exploding — and Canadian politicians are spreading it
Eco-arsonists, mandatory bug diets and global warming denialism are now talking points for Canadian politicians. What’s behind the explosion of climate misinformation — and how can we combat it?
In Canada, climate misinformation and conspiracy theories are now a regular part of every election cycle and frequent talking points for many politicians. How did we get to this point?
Like climate change itself, conspiracy theories and misinformation are growing crises. And where they intersect with the environment, the problem seems to spread like wildfire — one that might be caused by laser beams, eco-terrorists or the Canadian government, depending who you ask.
Year after year, poll after poll has consistently shown a majority of Canadians believe in human-caused climate change. But across the country, Conservative politicians are fomenting weariness and skepticism about climate science to appeal to their bases and undermine their opponents — and it appears to be working.
The BC Conservative party, which won 44 seats in the recent provincial election, narrowly losing to the embattled NDP, is led by John Rustad — a man who has called global warming due to carbon emissions “a lie” and said climate action was part of an agenda to reduce the world’s population.
During the election campaign, Rustad acknowledged climate change was “real” but stressed that in his view it was “not a crisis”. His party, which had not held a single seat since 1979, shot from 1.9 per cent of the popular vote in 2020 to 43.3 per cent in 2024, cannibalizing support from the imploded BC United party and winning over scores of voters furious with the status quo.
Rustad’s strong showing came just over a year after a national poll conducted in July 2023, in the midst of Canada’s worst wildfire season on record. It found 58 per cent of British Columbians were convinced human activity was responsible for climate change — a lower share than residents of Ontario, Quebec or the Atlantic region.
In 2023, the most destructive wildfire season in Canadian history, a national poll found that more than half of British Columbians were not convinced that human activity was changing the climate. Photo: Mike Graeme / The Narwhal
What’s more, the same poll found the number of Canadians who believed humans were responsible for climate change declined by nine percentage points from the previous year. There is a clear political split on views regarding climate change, with Conservative voters less likely to believe in climate change than NDP or Liberal voters. And as climate change falls out of favour, even progressive politicians appear willing to compromise on their values — as the federal NDP party did in September when they took up Pierre Poilievre’s refrain to axe the carbon tax.
In Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith has repeated misinformation, attributing wildfires to arsonists rather than climate change — a theory her own fire service has refuted, saying “It’s not an emerging trend that we’re concerned about right now.”
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Even climate-adjacent policies spark conspiracy theories. Take the 15-minute city, an urban planning strategy that focuses on walkable neighbourhoods, incidentally decreasing driving-related emissions: the idea triggered an outcry in Edmonton from residents who believed it was a leftist plot to restrict their freedom of movement.
These measures are not widely understood as efforts to protect the environment or mitigate climate change — they’re spun as sinister plots to curtail personal liberties.
Rustad, speaking at a May 2023 conference held “in recognition of the 2022 Freedom Convoy,” stoked this underlying fear. Referring to a food manufacturing plant “built in Ontario, I think in the Ottawa area,” he suggested Canadians would be forced to eat bugs in the name of climate change.
While the plant is real, there’s no evidence it’s part of a nefarious plot to insinuate insects into the Canadian diet, as its main customers are pets. That didn’t stop Rustad. “It will destroy our quality of life …” he said, attempting to draw a vague but alarming connection between bug diets and public transit and walkable neighbourhoods. “Limiting our ability to move around in the name of climate change just makes us vulnerable to more government control. It takes away our freedoms.”
BC Conservative Leader John Rustad, who came close to winning the 2024 provincial election, has frequently denied the causes and severity of climate change. Illustration: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal
For Conservative politicians, it seems rejecting climate change policies is not about the environment at all — it’s convenient shorthand for championing individual rights, while offloading the government’s responsibility for addressing carbon emissions, by framing climate change as either a natural, benign phenomenon or a leftist plot. Instead of addressing climate change — the worsening impacts of which are impossible to ignore, no matter how deep your head is buried in the sand — our politicians argue over the inescapable facts in front of them.
For the average Canadian voter, it’s infuriating: how can we extinguish the misinformation that’s torching an increasingly large share of reality? And how did it ever get this bad in the first place?
When conspiracy theories met climate change
Denying the severity or existence of climate change is not new, but the role of conspiracy theories is. For her most recent bestselling book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein, a professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, studied how conspiracy theories surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, dividing and polarizing Canadians.
The disinformation channels that developed during the pandemic “now spring into action after every extreme weather event … it’s as if conspiracy culture has replaced traditional climate denial,” Klein observed in a recent webinar organized by the Centre for Climate Justice. Understanding how and why that misinformation spreads, Klein argues, is critical to combatting it.
Anatoliy Gruzd, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and director of research at its Social Media Lab, points at social media platforms designed to make content go viral. “And what’s the most engaging content? It’s controversial content. It’s polarizing content,” he says.
When someone shares an outrageous claim on social media, it’s common for people to weigh in and debunk it. It’s tempting to believe the best way to combat a falsehood is with the truth, but the reality isn’t so straightforward. Gruzd points out fact-checking is labour-intensive, which makes it difficult to scale.
What’s more, it can actually contribute to virality, spreading misinformation further. “Sometimes, from the studies we’ve seen, you can have this backfire effect — where if [a claim] is fact-checked, it actually gets more eyeballs,” he says.
Researchers call this the “illusory truth effect.” Repeated exposure to a claim makes it seem more convincing. This effect is especially powerful over a short period of time — for example, when a false claim blows up on social media. False claims accompanied by images are even more persuasive, like when videos from the B.C. Wildfire Service were manipulated to show helicopters setting wildfires instead of extinguishing them, fuelling rampant theories about government-engineered disasters.
The other problem, Gruzd says, is hyper-individualized information streams. “We used to kind of tap the same information environment, the same news cycle,” he says. “But now we’re across multiple social media platforms, and even within the social media platforms, we’re in our own bubbles.”
And for Canadians, regardless of political orientation, those bubbles contain less news than ever. Since August 2023, news accounts and content have been banned on Instagram and Facebook, but fewer than one in four Canadians is aware of that — and more than half still say they read, watch and listen to news on these platforms. Meanwhile, since Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk and renamed X, its limited protections against the proliferation of misinformation have been dismantled. Mechanisms that ostensibly protect users from misinformation are inadequate, and at times part of the problem, as when X’s “Community Notes” feature — a fact-checking tool that relies on user submissions — was used to discredit a meteorological projection of Hurricane Beryl in June.
These false claims have real-world consequences: a Quebec man who bought into wildfire conspiracies was convicted in January 2024 of 14 counts of arson, which he described as “tests” of whether or not the forest was truly dry. In the United States, meteorologists now face a spike in death threats after major weather events from individuals who believe in climate denialist conspiracies, including that hurricanes or tornadoes are engineered by the government. Their jobs will only become more difficult soon: the Trump administration has vowed to dismantle the federal weather-monitoring service over what it calls “climate alarmism.”
As always, maybe the solution to the problem is spending less time online
In an ideal world, the social media platforms we rely on for communication and information would put guardrails in place to control the spread of harmful conspiracies. But as the standoff between the federal government and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, demonstrates, Canadians have little power to influence the agenda of these tech behemoths — even if our politicians wanted to stem the conspiratorial tides.
The best place to resist online conspiracies might be in the real world. In the webinar with Klein, Erin Blondeau, director of communications for the Climate Emergency Unit — a solutions-focused project of the David Suzuki Institute — pointed out that nuance and complexity can’t flourish online. She sees more opportunity in placing skeptics and those who simply have questions face-to-face with people they trust and are facing the same challenges they are.
“I think bridging segregated realities needs to be on an interpersonal level, with in-person community events, spaces where people can ask questions and be educated in ways that won’t push them away further.”
“It’s easy to dehumanize people in these situations,” Blondeau added. “And we have to work really hard not to.”
Online, it’s especially easy to dehumanize seeming opponents by trying to win an argument. It’s in person where we have the best chance of reaching one another, and the politicians who represent us.
As we brace ourselves for a federal election, our energy would be better spent offline: connecting with one another, showing up to campaign events and talking to political leaders in person. At least it’s an opportunity to inhabit the same reality for a while.
Updated on Jan. 2, 2025 at 10:57 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the proportion of British Columbians who believe climate change is human-caused. A previous version of this story said 58 per cent did not believe in human-caused climate change.
Another year of keeping a close watch
Here at The Narwhal, we don’t use profit, awards or pageviews to measure success. The thing that matters most is real-world impact — evidence that our reporting influenced citizens to hold power to account and pushed policymakers to do better.
And in 2024, our stories were raised in parliaments across the country and cited by citizens in their petitions and letters to politicians.
In Alberta, our reporting revealed Premier Danielle Smith made false statements about the controversial renewables pause. In Manitoba, we proved that officials failed to formally inspect a leaky pipeline for years. And our investigations on a leaked recording of TC Energy executives were called “the most important Canadian political story of the year.”
Here at The Narwhal, we don’t use profit, awards or pageviews to measure success. The thing that matters most is real-world impact — evidence that our reporting influenced citizens to hold power to account and pushed policymakers to do better.
And in 2024, our stories were raised in parliaments across the country and cited by citizens in their petitions and letters to politicians.
In Alberta, our reporting revealed Premier Danielle Smith made false statements about the controversial renewables pause. In Manitoba, we proved that officials failed to formally inspect a leaky pipeline for years. And our investigations on a leaked recording of TC Energy executives were called “the most important Canadian political story of the year.”
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