A sitting Conservative MP spread climate-related conspiracy theories that could increase the “threat of serious violence” in Canada, according to a secret briefing from the Canada Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
As wildfires raged across Canada last month, Cheryl Gallant used her Facebook account to amplify rhetoric that casts doubt on climate change and its role in fuelling wildfires.
Though not named directly, the CSIS briefing referenced Gallant, conservative MP for the riding of Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke near Ottawa, who for years has used her political platform to spread unsubstantiated claims about shadowy global forces trying to control Canadians through climate policies.
These claims were not only inaccurate, they also had the potential to radicalize Canadians and incite them to violence, the June 2022 assessment from the country’s top intelligence agency concluded. The brief was made public in 2025.
“During the 2021 Canadian federal election, for example, a soon-to-be re-elected politician released a pamphlet claiming that incumbent government would, if re-elected, ‘legislate rolling lockdowns in response to an ill-defined climate emergency,’” the briefing reads.
“The continued belief in conspiracy theories across the IMVE [Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism] milieu will likely remain a key driver of the increased threat of serious violence,” it added.
The brief’s warnings remain relevant as wildfire-related climate conspiracies proliferate across social media during this summer’s destructive season, with Gallant taking part. In July, the right-wing politician posted a video to her Facebook page stating that “fires in northern Canada are not about global warming, they’re not about forest management. It’s Mother Nature.”
In an interview with DeSmog, Amarnath Amarasingam, professor of religion and political studies at Queens University in Ontario who researches extremism and radicalization, said these types of CSIS threat assessment briefs“tend to be forward facing.”
“It’s a signal internally and to other departments of things that they’re concerned about over the next little while,” he said. “More and more we’re seeing kind of this anti-government populist movement get wrapped up in conspiracy theories around government overreach.”
IMVE: A Look Forward
In June 2022, CSIS produced an intelligence assessment called “Climate Change and Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism (IMVE): A Look Forward.” The brief “identifies potential national security threats associated with climate change.”
The brief finds that conspiracy theories, misinformation, and fake news will influence IMVE threat actors, including those who do not “accept the significance or scope of climate change.” The brief states that “as the dialogue shifts from COVID-19 related restrictions to climate change policies and direction, some narratives will deny its existence; others will denounce resulting policy direction as government overreach or a form of societal control.”
CSIS warns that as climate change worsens, there is a threat of serious violence due to polarizing narratives about government climate solutions. It explains that eco-fascists blame environmental degradation on immigrants and warns that neo-fascist and white supremacist movements will continue to take advantage of environmental degradation to promote anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence.
The brief describes how several “IMVE mass casualty attackers” cited environmental destruction or climate change as motivation for their brutal attacks, including Nathaniel Veltman, who killed four members of the Afzaal family in London, Ontario in 2021.
Moving onto the context behind pandemic conspiracy theories, CSIS finds that “the primary grievances and conspiracy theories underlying much of the Anti-Public Health Measure Movement (APHM) are now appearing within the context of climate change denial.” It describes how Telegram groups that had formed to oppose COVID-19 pandemic measures began increasingly discussing climate change through the same conspiratorial lens.
The brief then explains that during the federal election in 2021, an incumbent candidate released a pamphlet through her official campaign office that promoted the “climate lockdown” conspiracy theory that the Liberal government would use the pretext of climate change to “legislate rolling lockdowns.”
While she is not named in the brief, the Canadian politician in question is Gallant, a Conservative Party MP who in 2021 released a pamphlet that included a poll for constituents asking “Do you support a climate lockdown?”
A couple of months earlier, Gallant had posted a video to her YouTube channel asking, “How long do you think it will take before the Trudeau Liberals start calling for a climate lockdown?” Gallant argued that when then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity for Canada “he was parroting talking points hammered out by the socialists from the World Economic Forum.”
The Conservative Party leader at the time, Erin O’Toole, reprimanded Gallant and required her to take down the video (though it is back up on Gallant’s YouTube page).
The CSIS brief writes that “The role of mainstream media and elected officials in — intentionally or unintentionally — amplifying climate change-focused messaging will continue to shape the broader narrative framework and the potential for weaponization of key messaging from across the IMVE landscape.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gallant was a vocal supporter of the Freedom Convoy that occupied downtown Ottawa for over three weeks in 2022. The convoy was organized ostensibly to oppose COVID-19 health measures, but some supporters were informed by a patchwork of conspiracy theories mentioned in the CSIS briefing. Gallant made social media posts supporting the convoy, and urged supporters to join it after the federal government had invoked the Emergencies Act to disband what had turned into an occupation.
“Violent extremism, whether it is religiously, ideologically, or politically motivated, continues to pose a significant threat to Canada’s national security,” CSIS stated in response to DeSmog’s request for comment. “Monitoring, investigating, and mitigating these serious threats are a key priority for CSIS and its national and international security partners.”
Gallant’s Continued Climate Conspiracies
Gallant remains a sitting MP and has made more social media posts warning of a pending climate lockdown, including in response to a National Post article called “‘Pandemic of Snow’ in Anchorage sets records” in January 2024. In another post in July 2023, Gallant shared the text from an Epoch Times article quoting U.S. Oil and Gas Association President Tim Stewart claiming the U.S. government was going to give itself the powers to declare a climate emergency to shut down free speech.
In a different YouTube video from September 2023 called “Climate Craze & Commies,” Gallant warns of the “threats of climate alarmism” and claims legacy media is “fully invested in the alarmist climate narrative.”
Gallant responded to DeSmog’s detailed questions by posting a public statement titled “Liberal Disinformation” to her website accusing the CSIS briefing note of spreading misinformation. “During a week when Steven Guilbeault announced his intention to resign from the Liberal Party over his objections to the Prime Minister’s approach to addressing climate change, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change discontinued the use of the doomsday forecast, RCP8.5, it is unsurprising the climate activists at DeSmog would try to dig up old news as a distraction,” the statement says. Gallant does not specify what “factually incorrect information” is in the CSIS brief.
Anti-Climate Media Ecosystem
The climate conspiracy theories mentioned in the CSIS briefing can be traced back to the early days of climate denial, according to Robert Neubauer, professor at the University of Winnipeg who studies the media strategies of Canadian environmental and pro-resource extraction social movements.
“This framing of climate change as simultaneously a hoax, but also part of what I think today would be called a kind of globalist elite agenda … is something that dates back to industry-funded messaging in terms of kind of early 90s through mid-thousands climate change denial,” he told DeSmog.
Neubauer said that think tanks and conservative news outlets started spreading the message in the 1990s “that the [climate] science was faked and so inherently politicized that it could no longer be trusted” and “either part of religious dogma or part of a conspiratorial plot.”
A second important piece is the “development of this right-wing kind of extremist digital media network or transnational network” that promotes climate denial and conspiracy theories online, and has “increasingly put people into echo chambers,” he added.
According to Amarasingam, Gallant’s climate lockdown pamphlet may have been inspired by climate conspiracy theories that went viral on social media, as “sometimes what [politicians] see go viral … online becomes fed into their talking points and political positions because they feel like that’s a reflection of their electorate and a reflection of what the constituency actually feels, which is usually not the case.”
“Fringe of the Environmental Movement” Threats
While the CSIS brief focuses on eco-fascism, white supremacists, and the APHM, it also contains a short section identifying potential threats from “the fringe of the environmental movement.” It first cites environmentalist David Suzuki’s comment that “there are going to be pipelines blowing up” if climate action isn’t taken seriously. The brief notes that Suzuki “apologized for his ‘poorly chosen words’ and clarified that violence will not lead to desperately needed solutions to the climate crisis.”
This section of the brief details examples of property destruction, threats and physical violence committed by groups within the environmental movement. It includes instances of violent rhetoric and violence from people and groups in the deep ecology movement who believe humanity as a whole is to blame for environmental crises. For example, a group called “Gaia Liberation Front” calls humans a “‘virus,’ and ‘cancer’ that must be excised from the planet. The brief describes Swedish academic Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which argues the climate movement must consider physically damaging fossil fuel infrastructure to tackle the sources of the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The CSIS brief does not mention environmental activists or Indigenous land defenders opposing fossil fuel projects in Canada, but there is a well-documented history of the agency surveilling and keeping records on these movements.
In 2019, the BC Civil Liberties Association leaked thousands of pages of redacted CSIS documents that were the result of surveilling Indigenous people and environmentalists who had opposed the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline.
This is an ongoing issue. The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation reported in October 2025 that TC Energy, the company behind the Coastal GasLink pipeline that faced massive opposition from Indigenous land defenders and environmentalists, successfully lobbied the former director of CSIS to hold information-sharing meetings between CSIS, the RCMP, and heads of major Canadian companies.
The most recent amendments to the CSIS Act, including the resiliency disclosure authority, have enhanced the ability of CSIS to share information about threats to Canada’s national security with a wider range of entities beyond the Government of Canada,” CSIS said in a statement in response to questions from DeSmog. “These authorities enable CSIS to share information more frequently in order to strengthen Canada’s overall resilience against national security threats.”
“CSIS’s approach on partnerships is highlighted in both the Public Report 2024 and Public Report 2025 and confirms that CSIS does engage with the Business Council of Canada and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, among others,” the agency said.
Looking ahead to the threat posed by climate conspiracy theories, Amarasingam said the “future worry is there can be an intersection of [eco-fascist movements] with these kind of anti-government populist movements that tend to talk about climate overreach or government overreach, or regulations … and a fusion of those two movements could happen like we saw a little bit during the convoy.”
Even if this conspiratorial movement doesn’t cause “outright attacks or violence,” Amarasingam said, it could pose “dangers to democracy and public safety and social cohesion,” and “could kind of damage our ability to live together as a coherent democratic liberal democratic country.”
