Misinformation-laden website almost convinces Alberta town to abandon climate program

Patrick Wilson, a councillor in Cochrane, Alta., let a website he’d found do the talking for him.

"This website I'm quoting from, I don't know a whole lot about," he told council on Monday night. "But I just thought their words were better than mine."

Wilson used those borrowed words to introduce a motion that would make Cochrane the first Alberta municipality to withdraw from Partners for Climate Protection, a national net-zero framework the town had been part of for over two decades.

The website Wilson was quoting is part of a troubling trend in local politics. It belongs to KICLEI (Kicking International Council out of Local Environmental Initiatives) – a group using an AI chatbot to craft talking points aimed at persuading local politicians to abandon net-zero programs. The chatbot is instructed to emphasize “local decision-making” and “non-partisan civic engagement,” while downplaying emissions targets and international cooperation.

KICLEI is not a reliable source of climate information, according to scientists at NASA, the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research and the University of Melbourne, who told Canada’s National Observer that the group has spread misinformation about their research.

Yet its messaging came within a whisker of spurring policy change in Cochrane. Only a last minute intervention by Mayor Genung halted the town’s exit from the PCP program until a review by an environmental task force.

KICLEI was founded in 2023 by former Freedom Convoy activist Maggie Hope Braun. Its campaign in Cochrane began in February 2025, when local resident Ron Voss presented a letter from KICLEI to the council that described Alberta as a "net carbon sink" and warned that the Partners for Climate Protection program imposes "unnecessary costs and external controls." 

These arguments are not new. They echo conspiracy theories popularized by the US Tea Party that claim that the climate crisis was invented by the UN to establish a "one world government" and erode private property rights. In 2010, dozens of US municipalities left the international sustainability network ICLEI because it promoted UN agendas. 

The same network ICLEI now administers the Partners for Climate Protection program with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, making it a natural target for a Canadian revival of the US movement. 

Canada’s National Observer’s recent investigation found that KICLEI is explicitly importing US Tea Party tactics into Canada. In August 2023, its founder Maggie Hope Braun told councillors in Douro-Dummer, Ontario that they were enabling "an act of treason" by allowing the creation of "UN city states." However, the group has since moderated its language, with the help of its AI chatbot.

When Wilson brought forward his motion, he acknowledged receiving an email warning councillors not to “abandon their net-zero commitments to carefully crafted conspiracy theories" – quoting our investigation. But Wilson pushed back, arguing that the council should take a role in approving any "externally-driven" initiatives. He expressed his “shock and surprise” that Cochrane had been a member of the climate protection program since 2004.

Wilson's reasoning resonated widely. At least three other councillors supported the motion to leave the program, with Councillor Marni Fedeyko reassured by staff that they could always rejoin later, after a pending local election, if needed.

The motion seemed certain to succeed until, at the last minute, Mayor Genung raised concerns about potential “ripple effects” on environmental progress in other municipalities. He also warned that Cochrane could lose access to grants from the Federation of Municipalities' Green Municipal Fund, which are available to members of the program.

The final decision was postponed until September, when the town’s environmental task force will report back on Genung’s concerns. 

As Genung suspects, the stakes of this decision may ripple far beyond Cochrane. So far, Thorold, Ontario is the only municipality that KICLEI has convinced to leave the Partners for Climate Protection program and it is frequently used as an example to legitimize the campaign.

KICLEI is a "very small group, trying to make a case that it is a national movement," said Fenwick McKelvey, an expert in Information and Communication Technology Policy at Carleton University. 

McKelvey is skeptical that many elected officials will be persuaded by KICLEI’s AI-powered campaign. “It’s going to come across as bullshit,” he said. 

Yet, at least one man disagrees. In a recent council meeting, Councillor Wilson waxed poetic, saying that KICLEI expresses his concerns “much better and more eloquently than I could.”