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National Observer

Wildfire misinfo forces a hard choice on Conservatives

The wildfires in Atlantic Canada have produced a new folk hero for Canada's alt-right: Jeff Evely, a retired soldier from Sydney Glace-Bay in Nova Scotia. On August 8, three days after premier Tim Houston banned the public from entering Nova Scotia's woods – with a $25,000 fine for transgressors – Evely filmed himself doing just that. The 6-minute video is oddly mesmerizing. Evely starts by visiting the conservation officers stationed in a small building at the edge of the forbidden forest; speaking with an air of calm bemusement, he informs the officers that he's about to walk into the trees. 'I don't want to make any trouble for you guys, I just want a piece of Tim Houston,' Evely says. A quick jaunt later, he's brandishing a ticket for $28,872.50. 'Unheard of relationships' Reasonable people can disagree on the wisdom and efficacy of banning the public from walking in the forest during a wildfire emergency. But the influencer crowd isn't interested in a reasoned debate. As the far-right media ecosystem launches its latest narrative, the federal Conservatives must decide whether to align themselves with the movement as they have on past issues, or maintain a careful distance. 'Jeff Evely from Canada has been fined $28,872.50 by the Nova Scotia Regime for walking into the woods which violates the WEF/WHO/UN 'Communist Climate Lockdowns,'' is how Liz Churchill put it to her 800,000 followers on X. 'Don't even think about the climate lockdowns you were warned about a year ago,' Kat Kanada posted sarcastically to her own quarter-million followers. 'Nothing to see here. Just a lockdown because of 'climate.'' Neither Tim Houston nor Susan Holt, New Brunswick's premier who also banned the public from the woods, has mentioned climate change as a reason for the ban. But that's the point: climate denial isn't about climate change anymore; it's just one of countless stories in a global library of conspiracy theories, all aimed at deepening our arguments and heightening distrust in authority. 'What's remarkable is the degree to which this belief in climate change being a fraud spills over to other things,' Frank Graves, president of the polling firm Ekos, told Canada's National Observer. Over the past five years, Graves' polling has revealed a stark correlation between climate denial, anti-vax conspiracies and a whole host of other demonstrably false narratives, all linked to Conservative voting. 'It spills into, like, Russians aren't committing war crimes in Ukraine,' Graves said. Support for Donald Trump, another example, is 25 times higher among Conservative voters than the national average. 'These are unheard of relationships that we've never seen before.' These relationships didn't just spring up organically, either. 'We know that it's linked to a disinformation ecosystem, some of it emanating as a tool of statecraft from other countries,' Graves said. 'Russia's really good at it. But it gets echoed as well back in our society.' People like Jeff Evely aren't on Vladimir Putin's payroll, Graves emphasizes. But whether they know it or not, they're swimming in a narrative soup that is heavily influenced by malicious foreign actors – Putin and Trump chief among them. The Tenet Media connection A powerful example is the Tenet Media affair that erupted one year ago in the US. Tenet Media was an American podcast and video platform founded in 2022 by two far-right Canadian influencers, Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan. The couple started Tenet with $10 million in seed money from RT (formerly Russia Today), an outfit Global Affairs Canada describes as 'a Russian state-owned media entity that has become actively engaged in Russia's global disinformation and influence efforts.' Tenet hired six more far-right influencers, including Canadian Lauren Southern, who worked for Rebel News before joining Tenet. Editorial control, however, was maintained by two Russian executives from RT. On September 4, 2024, the US Department of Justice indicted those two executives for spreading Russian propaganda, and the company was dissolved (none of the Canadian or American influencers who worked for Tenet were charged, and all claimed ignorance of the source of their funding). The majority of content Tenet produced in its brief lifetime was directed at American politics and politicians. But Canadians were deeply enmeshed in those narratives, which often targeted Canadian politics as well. The Canadian Digital Media Research Network conducted a forensic analysis of Tenet Media's impact on Canadians. 'Across all podcasts produced by Tenet Media influencers, we found regular and intense criticism of Canadian public policy and Canadian politicians,' the report wrote. For instance, Lauren Southern created over 50 videos about Canadian politics for Tenet. One was called 'Canada is Becoming a COMMUNIST HELLHOLE. ' That video featured Kat Kanada, who compared Soviet-era breadlines with health care wait lists and other queues she found here. As mentioned above, Kat Kanada is now promoting the 'climate lockdown' theory of Nova Scotia's hiking ban. She's just one of several Canadian influencers who were briefly in the Tenet orbit to do so. All of these influencers were fixtures of Pierre Poilievre's election campaign; they attended and broadcast his rallies and posted daily pro-Conservative videos to millions of Canadians. A few weeks after the election, Poilievre personally called many of those influencers to thank them for their help. Kat Kanada was one of them. That doesn't mean Poilievre, Kanada, or anyone else in that cohort was deliberately working for Putin. The forensic analysis by the Canadian Digital Media Research Network explicitly ruled this out. 'We find no evidence of such a link,' the authors wrote. 'There are minimal public interactions between Tenet Media influencers and Canadian politicians. Moreover, no Canadian politician regularly produces content online that is comparable to that of the Tenet Media influencers.' In fact, the authors lamented attempts by left-wing partisans in the days following the Tenet indictments to make such a connection. They discounted a #PierrePutin hashtag that began circulating online as baseless. 'We've given the far left a free pass on this stuff,' Marcus Kolga, the founding director of DisinfoWatch, told Canada's National Observer. In fact, says Kolga, there's a huge number of far-left activists, agitators and influencers whose impact on Canada's public discourse mirrors that of the far right. One example Kolga named was Dmitri Lascaris, who describes himself as a 'lawyer, journalist and activist.' Lascaris ran for leadership of the federal Green Party in 2021; after losing, he went on to visit Moscow and Crimea in 2023 and wrote glowing reviews of what he saw. 'He actually posted photos that he was in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs meeting with Russian officials, just a year after the invasion of Ukraine,' Kolga said. But the both-sides comparisons only go so far. A massive partisan asymmetry is at the heart of this story, one that Kolga, Graves and other experts Canada's National Observer reached out to for this story all emphasized. Namely: You don't see far-left influencers at a Liberal election rally. At Pierre Poilievre's rallies, influencers were everywhere. The federal Conservative Party has enmeshed itself with them and their false narratives in a way that no other Canadian party has. 'There's reasons those people got there' There are signs that Pierre Poilievre and the federal Conservatives are conflicted about this relationship. As of this writing, nobody from the Conservative Party of Canada has tweeted anything about 'climate lockdowns' in Atlantic Canada; their critique of the hiking ban has been extremely muted and Poilievre hasn't touched the issue at all. That's in stark contrast to the last popular cause to reverberate through the far-right information ecosystem. During the sentencing hearing of Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber three weeks ago, Poilievre and many of his top MPs were posting in lockstep with the same influencers who are now up in arms about the hiking ban. Why the sudden distance? One complicating factor is surely that Tim Houston, the premier of Nova Scotia, is a Conservative. Another twist is that Jeff Evely, who martyred himself with a $28K ticket, belongs to the far-right People's Party of Canada; he ran as a candidate in the recent election. Until now, the PPC has been so fringe they've made the federal Conservatives look reasonable. Associating with them would almost certainly exacerbate the problem that arguably cost Poilievre the election — the perception that he's too cozy with extremists. Even trickier: Evely was also one of the protagonists of the 'Freedom Convoy'. He was convicted of mischief and banned from Ottawa for two years for his role in that movement. Poilievre isn't the only one facing a dilemma here. Those who oppose the convoy and what the Conservative Party has become need to rise above mockery in their critiques, says Graves. 'It's not helpful.' 'There's reasons those people got there, and it's not just because they're stupid. This becomes possible because you have members of our society who feel despair.' Whatever one makes of Poilievre's motives or policies, he's the one federal politician who made a sustained effort to connect with the working class of Canadians who are hardest hit by rising inequality in Canada. The good news, says Graves, is that only about seven per cent of Canadians are so deeply radicalized as to be beyond the point of no return. 'We know that people who are moderately disinformed exhibit a fair bit of plasticity,' he said. 'They can be brought out of that state of disinformation.' Meanwhile, after 150 days in office, Carney's approval rating is a sky-high 64 per cent – almost exactly the proportion of Canadians who reject online conspiracies, says Graves. 'There's people who don't trust the legacy media,' he allows, 'but 65 per cent do.' Even the CBC, the most pilloried of legacy media, is trusted by roughly half of Canadians; by contrast, only five per cent trust information they get off Facebook, and just one per cent trust X (formerly Twitter). Even those numbers, though, are roughly three times higher than they were before the previous federal election, said Graves. He urged all levels of society to engage with these issues while there's still time; history suggests what can happen if we don't. 'Both Goebbels and Trotsky said a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth,' he said. 'But they didn't have algorithmically driven AI ... to disseminate it.'