Mark Freeman was scrolling on Facebook when he saw the video ad pushing for fossil fuel expansion. With cheerful cartoons and a guitar noodling in the background, the video pitched hydrocarbons as the solution to Canada’s affordability crisis.
“Government regulation is making you poorer by stifling investment in Canada’s oil and gas sector,” it declared. “The result? A weaker economy and a higher cost of living for you.”
It was posted by Affordability Advocates, an anonymous page that purports to champion the economic struggles of everyday Canadians. In another ad, the page decries “red tape” for “delaying and cancelling energy projects.” Others blame the carbon tax for rising food prices and inflation.
The videos made Mark suspicious — having recently campaigned to prevent the expansion of a gas plant in his hometown of Thorold, Ontario, his gut told him Affordability Advocates wasn't what it appeared to be.
“If they are a legitimate organization, why don’t they have a website?” Freeman questioned.
His instincts were spot on.
It turns out Affordability Advocates is part of a hidden network of fossil fuel boosters with ties to the Conservative Party of Canada who ran a blitz ad campaign in October and November 2024 in Thorold, a key battleground in Ontario’s ongoing energy debate.
Each Facebook and Instagram page is set up to appear like a grassroots organization, but offers little information about its funding, purpose or connections to a greater cause. Tracing the network back to its source exposes a new twist on past anonymous tactics — a single campaign fragmented across multiple pages and spending at unprecedented levels. This strategy has gone largely unnoticed in Canada, even as it’s helping shape some of the country’s most heated debates about the best way to meet our growing energy needs ahead of provincial and federal elections.
Deep Conservative Party roots
Evidence from Meta’s Ad Library indicates the fossil fuel ad campaign was managed by One Persuasion Inc. — a PR firm with well-known ties to the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre and the fossil fuel industry. All of the contact phone numbers listed on the ads redirect to a voicemail box of Travis Freeman, a partner at the firm.
Freeman is described on One Persuasion’s website as having been “lead for the Conservative Party of Canada digital team in the 2008 and 2011 federal elections” and a web developer for “the Conservative Caucus Research Department.”
Hamish Marshall, another partner at the firm, managed Andrew Scheer’s 2019 federal election campaign, once held a director role at Rebel Media Ltd., and has a long history of communication on behalf of the oil industry. Additionally, the firm’s vice president, David Murray, served as Pierre Poilievre’s Director of Policy until July 2024. Ontario corporate records list Marshall, Travis Freeman, Brendan Jones and Terrance Oakey as active directors of One Persuasion Inc.
We contacted One Persuasion Inc. and its staff four times for comment, giving the organization the opportunity to clarify its involvement and who funded the ads. We received no response.
Parliamentary expense records indicate that Poilievre himself has been a client of One Persuasion Inc. since at least 2022, with his latest expense report showing a payment of $6,110 to the firm. It was Poilievre’s single largest expenditure, representing about a quarter of his total declared costs. Last year, the Government of Alberta also reported paying One Persuasion Inc. over $227,000.
The firm has also worked in the past for the now-defunct Canadian Energy Centre — often called Alberta’s “Energy War Room” — and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). Both are known for aggressively promoting the oil and gas industry while opposing climate action.
Canada’s National Observer discovered the ad campaign using a novel data tool we developed to find similarities in the messaging of all political ads on Meta’s platforms in Canada. This tool detected similar language in the ads posted by the pages Fair Share Report, Affordability Advocates, Energy Gap and Fueling Modern Life.
Each page was designed to look like a different group and had no organizational presence outside of Meta’s platforms. Yet their phone numbers, each with its own area code, all led to Travis Freeman’s voicemail. Those phone numbers could not have been added haphazardly or by accident; they are authenticated during Facebook’s verification process.
We then discovered that a fifth page, Atlantic Prosperity, leads to the same voicemail. (That page was the subject of a CNO story over the summer, when it, too, spent thousands to promote oil and gas.) We compared the metadata of images on its website, atlanticprosperity.ca, with those on One Persuasion Inc.’s official website and a further four domains registered to the firm. All 33 images can be traced back to a single Adobe Photoshop file (suggesting they share the same creator), further corroborating the link between the ads and the PR firm.
One Persuasion Inc.’s website boasts of having worked with Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, as well as Pierre Poilievre, using grassroots-based tactics.
“The new power currency in Ottawa is lists,” it says. “How many people support your policy? … We’re the experts at building and using lists.”
Dr. Elizabeth Dubois, an Associate Professor at University of Ottawa who studies political uses of digital media, explained that the firm’s clear historical ties to political parties suggests that there needs to be “attention paid to how the money is flowing; who has paid for these accounts.”
By failing to list their true funders, the pages may violate Meta’s requirement for an “accurate, complete and truthful” funding disclaimer on all “political and issues” ads. The pages appear to have taken advantage of a 2022 rule change allowing small businesses without a dedicated website or institutional email to run issues ads. Dubois noted that the policy “created a loophole that has been exploited by campaigns to create pages which are essentially dead ends.”
This means users could be simultaneously targeted by ads from all four pages without realizing all the ads originate from a single source. “They are doing it subversively across multiple different pages, making it appear that it’s not just one group saying this,” Mark Freeman said.
The diversity of pages also serves another purpose: “When we hear the same story coming from a lot of different accounts we're more likely to say, ‘That's got to be true. There's got to be a strong backing for that,’” Dubois explained.
While advertising anonymously isn’t illegal outside of an election period, Dubois believes that “the lack of transparency around the coordination is the major concern.” She argues Meta has a responsibility to enforce its own transparency rules.
Meta did not respond to four requests for comment on whether the ads broke its rules and why the company failed to enforce them.
A firehose of ads
At first, the ads were seen nationwide, primarily in Ontario. But in October 2024, they honed in on just eight postal areas in Niagara. The geographical concentration of spending is striking. In one month alone, between mid-October and mid-November 2024, the four One Persuasion-linked pages spent $153,166 on Facebook and Instagram ads exclusively targeting Thorold and nearby St. Catharines. According to Meta’s Ad Library, this is more than every other page except for what the Conservative Party of Canada spent nationally over the same period.
Thorold, located on the Niagara Escarpment, has a population of just under 24,000 people. It’s also a battleground in Ontario’s ongoing energy debate. In 2023, its city council unanimously rejected Northland Power’s proposal to expand its gas plant in Thorold South.
A new energy procurement is now underway in Ontario that could lock in lucrative natural gas contracts until at least 2050, worth over a million dollars a day. The procurement was initially limited to renewable energy projects. However, on Aug. 31, 2024, Ontario's Minister of Energy and Electrification Stephen Lecce intervened to make it “technology agnostic” and therefore open to natural gas. Mark Freeman is concerned this could reopen the door for natural gas projects in Thorold.
Five weeks after the policy change was announced, all four Facebook and Instagram pages stopped advertising nationally and began exclusively targeting Thorold and St. Catharines. This timing also coincided with the Alberta Government’s Scrap the Cap campaign against the federal government’s proposed emissions cap. However, the geographical targeting suggests a strong interest in the local area.
"The specificity of the geographic targeting is a dimension that I haven't seen before," said Dr. Shane Gunster, Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University and an expert in environmental communication.
Thorold and St. Catharines, like all municipalities in Ontario, have a veto on local energy projects. This means that public sentiment could influence the fate of 20-year natural gas contracts, setting a precedent for future energy decisions across Canada. Because the procurement process is still in its early stages, no energy companies have publicly announced whether they are planning projects in the area.
Mark Freeman spoke up against Northland Power’s previous gas plant expansion proposal during a council meeting in September of 2023. But he doesn’t think local voices are cutting through the noise; he’s concerned that fossil fuel “misinformation” is gaining traction in Thorold. He points to June, 2024, when 241 local residents signed a petition claiming that “CO2 is not a pollutant.” It led to Thorold City Council withdrawing from Partners for Climate Protection, a scheme that educates municipalities on how to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
"Because we're pushing and St. Catharines has pushed for climate action, we are seeing the counter-action happening," explained Freeman.
Daya Lye, a mother of two living in St Catharines, was targeted by ads from the page Fueling Modern Life. The page purports to belong to a “continuously curious” digital artist who set it up to share her oil and gas-themed artwork. In reality, it is part of a large-scale fossil fuel industry influence operation linked to One Persuasion Inc.
Lye is worried the campaign might convince people that more natural gas is inevitable, despite the worsening climate crisis. “It makes me feel afraid,” she said.
Her fears about the ability of the ads to reach people are reasonable. One of the ads, a video posted on the page Fair Share Report, has already garnered 5.4 million views.
Despite spending over $330,000 on ads in 2024, Fair Share Report has only 250 followers. Gunster explained that this is unusual for right-wing influence pages, which often try to gain authenticity by cultivating massive social media followings.
This makes him suspect that the campaign is an “experiment” testing out disposable “pop-up” pages. According to Gunster, this tactic allows PR firms to launch campaigns, spend heavily and then vanish without accountability. All four pages abruptly stopped advertising in December 2024. This approach offers anonymity and plausible deniability, an attractive service for corporate and political clients, he explains.
Both Dubois and Gunster point to Meta’s responsibility to moderate these tactics. As traditional news outlets have declined — and some social media platforms like X and those owned by Meta have de-emphasized or banned news outright — Canadians have increasingly turned to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram for information, according to Statistics Canada. In 2023, Meta reported $131.9 billion USD in ad revenue.
Gunster argues that in a democracy, social media users need to know “where ideas are coming from and who is advocating for them.” This requires Meta to enforce its own transparency policies and hold advertisers accountable for their claims. In January of 2025, the company announced the end of its third-party fact checking program, a decision that Gunster calls a “shameful abdication of responsibility.” It is not yet known if this change will spread to Canada.
With a federal election on the horizon and critical energy decisions looming, the emergence of the anonymous campaign in Thorold may be a bellwether for the rest of Canada, Gunster warns: without Meta’s moderation, these tactics “are only going to become more widespread” as PR firms continue pushing the envelope.
—David McKie contributed to this reporting.
Comments
The Conservative party of Canada and the Alberta UCP government faithfully working for their Oil & Gas Overlords
Thank you Rory.
This kind of investigative reporting is very valuable -- at least to those who are trying to pay attention to the manipulative machinations of the fossil fuel industry. Too bad mainstream media and social media won't likely carry this story so that a greater share of society can be better informed.
Excellent piece of investigative journalism Rory White. Another good reminder to avoid social media...particularly now that all the tech bros billionaires are brown nosing to their new leader....unless you like being bullshitted.
I have mentioned more than once in the past that Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative party are using third party sites to spread propaganda and misinformation for some time now. This article just adds to what I suspected ever since Pierre and his convoy clowns started bashing Justin Trudeau and spreading disinformation about the carbon measures. The added part to this, is the article links ties between the conservatives and oil & gas.
It seems this all should be investigated by the RCMP.
I'm not sure it amounts to criminal behavour, even, though it should. I'm not even sure that running afoul of the truthfulness in advertising piece amounts to criminal behaviour, though it should. I doubt that subjecting Canadians to BS about their own country and politicians on social media is even criminal.
Science journals publish "bad science," another word for lies.
This piece, put together with the piece Max Fawcett wrote a couple of days ago and the information in the comments, particularly an Tyee link about a book about Stephen Harper, including information about the robocall "scandal" ... it wasn't actually a scandal, IMNSHV, it was perpetrating fraud
all put together makes for a single story that tells a whole lot more than the sum of its parts, as it were. The journalism was all done; the only thing missing is joining all the pieces. That is also, of course, what investigative journalism itself is.
In a way, that's a bit like science that doesn't get done, because it doesn't need grants for new research. A lot of things connect together without flaws, without gaps, and without questions ... but when there's no science funding, no patents and no original publishing to be done, there's not much in it for someone pursuing a career in research.
BTW, they've been bashing Carney now too, and have bashed others with Liberal connections in the not-so-distant past. Amanda Lang comes to mind. The bashing is now typically done with quite convincing AI mimicking.
Why is it that Conservatives, especially these Reform Conservatives, feel they have to play dirty in order to gain power? There's always something untoward associated with any of their elections, be it leadership (votes go missing or are destroyed immediately), or a Candidate gets accused of some crime (Patrick Brown in Ontario which turned out to be nothing) and on and on. There was an industrial sized RoboCall scam federally in 2011 that never really came to a close but the Judge said it's root was these Cons because the people who experienced the scam were all non-Cons, sent to the wrong polling stations by someone identifying themselves as from Elections Canada. It is never ending. It makes one wonder if these people know that they are not trustworthy and must play dirty tricks to get the top jobs because if the people knew their real agenda they would never, ever be chosen as first pick.
Trudeau should have pushed through Ranked ballot and we would have seen then how Cons would have done. Obviously first pick by their supporters but never second pick for any of the others which would keep them on the fringe where their ideas/policies belong.
They feel they have to play dirty in order to gain power because they DO have to play dirty in order to gain power. Conservatism has various different as it were "immediate" positions and apparent ideologies, but the fundamental point of Conservatism since the days of Edmund Burke is oligarchy. Conservatism is about the idea that there should be steep hierarchy and a few should rule the many. This cannot be expected to be a fundamentally popular idea among the many.
That is the basic problem for conservatives in a democracy: Getting the masses to vote against themselves. Obviously they have to lie and cheat if they're going to accomplish that. Luckily for them, they also, as the political group dedicated to the interests of the wealthiest, pretty much by definition have plenty of money with which to accomplish such lying and cheating.
Ranked ballot is a terrible system for parliamentary voting. Trudeau should have just grimaced and listened to all the experts and other responders saying to do a proportional representation system. If we had a Mixed Member Proportional system right now, the seats would reflect people's actual wishes, and as a side bonus there's no way the Conservatives could get a majority. If they wanted a sniff of power, they'd have to become not-horrible enough that other parties would be willing to work with them.
True, the Liberals would generally be in a minority, probably propped up by the NDP. But most of the best things that have ever been done in Canadian government, were done by Liberal minority governments propped up by the NDP.
You who are so certain about PR as THE solution are simply speculating, and refuse to acknowledge how divisive this change would clearly be despite the level of disagreement about WHICH version of it to implement
Obviously the internet has changed everything, as this article outlines yet again with the observation "the center is not holding." The new reality is that politics has become binary. What I don't understand is WHY progressives continue to REFUSE to see that, even as their proud egalitarianism and fair-mindedness is repeatedly used against them? What IS that willful blindness akin to religious delusion that means the progressives keep splitting our potential majority vote, never more needed?! Like in Ontario currently.
As I keep saying, aren't we supposed to be the smart ones? But I guess that's too "negative" or pejorative to pass muster?
I'll put it another way. This morning on CBC I heard a couple of clearly progressive Calgary city councilors who are withdrawing because of the atmosphere, i.e. regular stoking of emotion often based on limited or questionable information, (sound familiar) or as one said, some of their colleagues had "a lack of intellectual humility."
So we're wasting our time by finding ever more inventive ways of saying that someone is BAD when we no longer have to, as with the big tech bros now standing proudly with Trump.
In the Liberal debate last night, no mention was made of the misinformation campaigns skewing information, even as the final question came up of how each candidate would differentiate themselves from Trudeau, as if HE was the openly Trump-adjacent guy, ignoring the unprecedented vilification campaign against him despite the question itself showing tacit acceptance of that. Clearly, subliminal effects are far-reaching.
PR is not THE solution, if you mean solution to all our woes in general. Just as one for-instance, I believe I've frequently been pretty outspoken about the need for major media reform, including very tough anti-trust rules breaking it up much smaller, nationalization of pieces as necessary, making bots outright illegal, firm reins on social media platforms, strong limits on propaganda spending. And indeed, I actually favour more radical intervention than that, this is just "art of the possible" stuff.
PR is, however, the best and most legitimate form of representative democracy.
And, when it comes to electing multiple representatives as in a parliament, ranked ballot is NOT, it's quite bad. Ranked ballot is good for electing single individuals--party leaders, mayors, presidents--and for referenda and "propositions" and such.
And the issue is not a purely instrumental one, in terms of what form will get the results that I want in the moment. Clearly, there is proportional representation in many countries which nonetheless have politics I don't like much. But if you want to take the concept of democracy seriously, then obviously representation should be proportional--if X% of people want representation with a particular ideology, then X% of the representatives should have that ideology (as approximated by a political party). Anything else is simply morally wrong. As with any form of democracy, the majority can be wrong, can want what will be a bad government--but it doesn't matter, they have the right to be wrong because they are the governed and they should get to choose who governs them; a good government without democratic legitimacy is not as good as a bad government with it. And a government with MORE democratic legitimacy is better than government with LESS democratic legitimacy. Proportional representation has significantly more democratic legitimacy than first past the post. This really shouldn't even be a discussion.
It sure as hell SHOULDN'T in the current BINARY context; it's beyond arcane.
"While advertising anonymously isn’t illegal outside of an election period"
--Yeah, maybe it should be.