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 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.
She was right. Thousands of councillors in more than 500 canadian towns have received these emails. An investigation by Canada’s National Observer found a custom AI chatbot is flooding city councils around the country with climate misinformation
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.”