Canadian climate activist Maggie Hope Braun.
Thanks largely to one woman with a mission who has taken on the United Nations’ climate change lies
Patrick Meagher
Farmers Forum
PETERBOROUGH — Maggie Hope Braun proves the rule that one person can make a difference. She also proves that while truth draws a crowd, it also draws enemies.
The Peterborough woman is so passionate about exposing climate change propaganda that within weeks of going public, she drew the ire of former Prime Minister Trudeau.
It all began in the summer of 2023. Braun had been meeting with local lawyer John Dunn to discuss the city’s 2019 “climate emergency” declaration. They followed the United Nations and World Economic Forum and their strategies to fool the world into signing on to top-down climate policies. They also watched how this globalist movement was seeping into local politics — diverting local funds into climate credit schemes and bankrupting municipalities.
Local politics is one area where Braun knew she had the power to affect change. She got up the courage to get on the agenda of a Peterborough city council meeting and brought up questions — enough to plant doubt not only locally but across the country. Councillors began rethinking their alignment with United Nations net-zero carbon emissions programs and the NGOs administering them.
Braun had the courage to disagree. She had read enough climate science, had completed a college-level environmental science program, and she knew the United Nations plan to restructure human society through local-level governments. Many of the draconian policies were coming down from ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives), a UN-founded organization that is also a Google-funded ideological tool to gather community data. Braun calls her group KICLEI — Kicking International Council Out of Local Environmental Initiatives.
She said it was easy to convince local politicians to push back when you simplify everything and just tell the truth. She argued that carbon dioxide cannot be pollution if it is necessary for plant life — and that an increase in CO₂ increases a farmer’s crop yield.
But here’s her big selling point. CO₂ makes up about 0.04 % of the Earth’s atmosphere. Got that? In other words, CO₂ makes up less than 1/20th of one percent. And of that tiny percent, human activity accounts for just 4 %. That’s 4 % of a tiny 0.04 %. So we’re talking about a tiny, tiny fraction of carbon dioxide — plant food — that is caused by global human activity. How much of that is caused by Canada? Just 1.6 % of the 4 % of the 0.04 %. That’s such a small number any grade school student knows you round that to zero.
So how much of the world’s CO₂ comes from the good citizens of Peterborough? Zero percent. Zilch. Nada. Nothing.
In fact, no municipality in Canada is producing a significant amount of CO₂ plant food that would have any effect on global temperatures. Yet, the Canadian government is focused on eliminating carbon dioxide emissions — or they tell us we risk human extinction. Braun points out that we are all being lied to, and that the emperor has no clothes.
Only a few weeks after speaking to Peterborough Council, Prime Minister Trudeau flew to Peterborough — not to meet with his MP, but the city’s mayor. At the same time, a national group of so-called “truth warriors” began a speaking tour, which turned into a Maggie Hope Braun bashfest to poison the well. To anyone who would listen, they even called her a UN operative. But she kept going.
Next, Braun addressed the Douro-Dummer council just as it was poised to adopt Ontario’s heavily criticized Official Plan. That plan would have centralized growth in urban areas and locked up rural land under ecological zoning — without proper local input. Thanks in part to her intervention, the council voted to delay adoption.
“We were just pointing out things that were true,” she said. “The truth resonates with people.”
From there, Braun’s efforts expanded nationally. She traveled to the City of Thorold and exposed the financial consequences of participating in the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ (FCM) flagship net-zero initiative — the Partners for Climate Protection (PCP) program. For a city of approximately 20,000 people, compliance would have meant electrifying the fleet, retrofitting buildings, and adopting new climate accounting processes. Thorold became the first municipality to officially withdraw from the PCP.
Braun argues that the PCP is a costly, ineffective carbon credit scheme that does little for local communities but demands massive expenditures with no measurable benefits. She calls it a “freemium marketing and data collection” program that uses sunk-cost psychology to lock municipalities into a pay-to-play model.
Municipalities are just giving away their citizens’ money.
It’s been two years since Braun launched her anti-propaganda campaign. She has now corresponded with over 522 municipalities across Canada — and the United Nations knows who she is. ICLEI has launched an online counterattack, labelling her appeals as misinformation.
The problem for the elitist-leaning United Nations is that you can only peddle lies for so long. Braun’s influence is so penetrating that entire municipalities like the County of Stettler and the Town of Vermilion have withdrawn from the FCM, a key partner in ICLEI programming — and many more are now reconsidering their participation in the PCP program.
The City of Lethbridge, Alberta, recently made a major decision that saved taxpayers $63 million. The city had set a PCP goal to reduce CO₂ emissions by 40 % by 2030. It was an impossible goal. So, to avoid burning millions on useless carbon credits, they simply cut their target to 20 % — with no downside.
The County of Renfrew exposed a key flaw in the net-zero model: new tree plantings get credits, but existing forests don’t count. So a city with two newly planted trees is officially more net-zero than a township in the middle of a forest that planted one. It’s absurd.
Last year, the Rural Municipalities of Saskatchewan voted to dump the net-zero plan altogether — while declaring that carbon dioxide is plant food, not a pollutant.
Braun’s KICLEI website is full of strategies, background, and practical tools. It even includes a carbon calculator to help municipalities figure out how much CO₂ they produce, absorb, and how much they’re being asked to spend per insignificant tonne.
She runs on the philosophy of “Localism over Globalism” and facts over fiction. As KICLEI rapidly becomes a national grassroots network, her main goal this year is to focus on behind-the-scenes support — helping local leaders organize and take action in their own communities.
“I began as one person stepping forward to set an example — essentially as a catalyst,” she told Farmers Forum. “This work must be done locally, and our hope from the beginning has been to inspire others to monitor their municipal agendas, learn how local governance operates, and get involved.”
