When wildfire smoke drifts across a Canadian town, it changes almost everything. The sun turns a strange orange, the air tastes metallic, and people start watching the sky with a tension they can’t quite explain. In the middle of that haze, reasonable questions about fire preparedness and climate policy should be parts of a shared conversation. Instead, in a disturbing number of corners, they become arguments about masterplots, global elites, and hidden designs meant to control ordinary citizens. That is why a June 2022 intelligence briefing produced by the Canada Security Intelligence Service, made public in 2025, still demands attention. The report, titled Climate Change and Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism: A Look Forward, looks beyond the smoke and trees to ask what these narrative shifts mean for national security. It warns that climate-related conspiracy theories are no longer just harmless internet noise; they are a key driver of what the intelligence community calls ideologically motivated violent extremism, a threat that could translate into acts of serious violence. Cheryl Gallant, a sitting Conservative MP from the riding of Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke, is not named in the briefing, but the contours of her public career are unmistakable in its cautionary pages. In July 2025, as fires became a defining story of the year, Gallant used her Facebook page to tell people that the fires were not about global warming or forest management, but simply nature doing its own thing. That single sentence may sound dismissive. In the framework of the briefing, it also sounds like a warning to heed.
The report pushes past the surface of whether fire seasons are widening and focuses on how public figures shape the emotional response to crisis. The June 2022 document traces a shift from pandemic grievances to climate grievances, particularly among those already radicalized by their opposition to anti-COVID health measures. One of its most striking moments is a reference to the 2021 Canadian federal election, when an incumbent politician, a serving Conservative MP facing re-election, sent out an official pamphlet asking constituents whether they would support a climate lockdown. The pamphlet alleged that a re-elected government would use emergency powers to impose rolling lockdowns in response to an “ill-defined climate emergency.” People do not have to look far to find which politician distributed that pamphlet; it was Gallant, whose office released it to voters. She later used YouTube to claim that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chatter about pandemic opportunities came from WEF socialists. Then-Mayor Conservative leader Erin O’Toole obliged her to remove the video, but the narrative stayed alive. The intelligence briefing states that exactly these theories—that climate action is really a technique of authoritarian social control—are now permeating extremist communities online. It notes that groups that previously flared Telegram channels to oppose COVID restrictions are now turning to the same language of oppression, fraudulent scientist and elite manipulation with climate change as the catalyst. It goes on: misinformation like this, amplified intentionally or not by mainstream and elected officials, could critically shape the broader narrative and make the serious violence more likely. The word “unlikely” is not used.
The threat graph in the briefing is not limited to climate change deniers. The report describes a wide political spectrum where violence can emerge from different directions. On one side are those who dismiss fires as natural and scientists as frauds; on the other are eco-fascists, a quieter but more disturbing fringe, who see environmental degradation as an excuse for white supremacist, Anti-immigrant violence. The national, CSIS notes, some of that type of ideology already invokes protection of the earth and of “purity” to justify hatred before massive criminals. The report makes clear that environmentalism itself is not the problem; but environmental themes can be weaponized by dangerous actors. It cites the 2021 murder of the Afzaal family in London, Ontario, where the attacker, Nathaniel Veltman, has explicitly considered the killing as a form of political warfare, a crime linked to a dark networks of far-right ideas. The report also reminds that violence can grow out of an overloaded, impatient activist mind not only from those who deny; it quotes environmentalist David Suzuki, who at one point spoke about pipelines “blowing” if climate action is not taken seriously, but then apologized. It even references the deep ecology, which calls humanity a virus on the planet, and the title How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a serious academic text that has become a flashpoint for debate about violent tactics. The point is that the CSIS assessment is not minimizing climate policy; it is saying that when the line between legitimate grievance, false disinformation and imagination becomes fluid, there is a security risk.
It is impossible to discuss Canada’s national security apparatus without acknowledging that the same CSIS that finger of climate conspiracy has for decades taken a long hard look at the people who oppose fossil fuels. In 2019, the BC Civil Liberties Association released thousands of pages of CSIS documents showing surveillance of Indigenous people and environmentalists who were fighting the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. Years later, more reports revealed that the company behind the Coastal Gas celebration, which blasted massive opposition from Indigenous land defenders, succeeded in lobbying the former director of CSIS for meetings between agency, RCMP and corporate executives. This history should both parallel and unsettle. The intelligence community is on alert about the possibility of doomsday claims generating violence; it has also been, historically, steady or not enough to imagine limited and legal environmental protest as a threat. In a democratic country, the identity of the dangerous actor is not a purely security estimation; it has to do with public trust and goes into what a state can be silently able. The result is a fertile soil for suspicion: people begin to think the system is pretending to fight certain me a fictional security threat while the real threat perhaps is not told to us. It is this very atmosphere of continuum insecurity that their own brief says encourages us to create injury.
The language of the intelligence report that reads like an episode of a policy analyst’s personal diary context: the CSIS is looking forward rather than backing what appears from the street. The experts interviewed about the briefing with this research note explain it has no public power. As Professor Amarnath Amar at the Queen’s University assured, these assessments are “forward-facing, intended signals for future alerts.” Amarasing’s concern is not only that a MP will comment rightly; sick and sideways is that anti-democratic populist movements are increasingly absorbing conspiracy theories around climate as their defining political tool. The beliefs are as real to them as the smoke in the sky. A professor Robert Neumba from the University of Winnipeg traces these conversations to earlier moments in climate denial: he points to industry-funded and supported think tanked messages from the 1990s that turned the scientific fact into something inherently suspicious. The idea that climate change is a false emergency and also, paradoxically, a globalist agenda—a hoax and a plot at the same time—was built to make it impossible to expect. Add a echo chamber of digital media and conservative influencers, and it becomes easier for narrative to reach a sitting senator. In this contact, Gallant’s climate lockdown vaccine is not original; it’s a remix of content that was already viral. The problem, as Amarasing puts it, is that elected officials interpret what goes viral as what citizens actually think, even when the real majority does not. That gap is dangerous. When the issue is pushed and open, the MP rejected all concerns, issuing response calling the reports “Liberal disinformation” contradiction. She didn’t point an error at the CSIS summary; she attacked, eventually, the institution that produced it. This defense is also familiar: when a report is deeply uncomfortable, the easiest reflex is to bring it into a storm of “disinformation” itself.
What to do with all this is not an abstract secret. First, being a climate conspiracy alter can be a stepping stone, not a direct claimant. There is no reason to believe each page sharing a “climate lockdown” meme will become a terrorist. But the accumulation of these falsehoods makes it impossible for a society to feel a soreness. The interpretive line is “After the well-known, extremists?”. If a person hears from the elected leaders that the air is not polluted, that the fire does not burn, that climate is not visible and all evidence is a secret plot, the foundation of a common world is executed. When, on the opposite side, the same state identifies that the violence is a top threat, it is easy to go over the same reports toward a overly critical issue. Amarnath e-mail “future concern” is not just the separate extreme; it is intersection, a fusion of anti-government anger and climate conspiracy that he sees as possible inside a revival of the Freedom Convoy. There are mental movements, he says, even if they don’t commit attacks, can destroy democracy, public safety and social cohesion. A country that can no longer agree on something as tangible as a smoky winter loses its capacity to respond to any crisis, like working together to reduce emissions or prepare for climate disasters. The evidence is in the same year: the more Canadians concerned with climate change, the more violent and criminal groups multiply, the more governments extend their tendencies, the more progress on issues requires conference and equality. Meanwhile, wildfire seasons don’t ask for opinions. They burn. Security has no clear direction if the fire advances. It is not possible to be extreme of the conspiracy and the urgent climate crisis at the same time, but the modern ecosystem of communication can encourage both. In the end, the CSIS report is a reminder not to destroy planes and bombs but to defend the roof edge of our evolutionary, honest ability to build common ground: natural husband. The smoke is real, and hope can be doing either.