How to slay a Trojan Horse

A source tipped us off to something strange: a campaign called KICLEI was flooding city councillor inboxes across Canada with slick, professional-sounding messages urging municipalities to abandon their climate commitments. It posed as environmental wisdom, but it was a Trojan Horse designed to undermine municipal climate policy.

Before, we would have investigated one city and written one story. But we had access to something new: a search engine we’d built in-house covering 617 municipalities and 24,318 council meetings. So we asked a question we couldn’t have asked before: Is this Trojan Horse rolling into council chambers everywhere?

It was.

A councillor who’d infiltrated a KICLEI meeting reported back after we published: the group announced it would begin operating “under the radar” because of our coverage. We’d put them on the radar.

Every instinct told me to keep the search engine proprietary. I’ve fought for every dollar for 18 years to support our journalism — giving away a competitive edge didn’t come naturally. But my team convinced me: this should be public infrastructure. So we launched Civic Searchlight and gave it away.

Within a month, more than 700 journalists, researchers, and civil society organizations had signed up. A journalist in Toronto could suddenly see what was happening in council chambers in Lethbridge. An advisor to a major city’s mayor called it indispensable. Academics, city officials, journalists from nearly every major organization in Canada were using it.

When someone launches an AI-driven disinformation campaign targeting local climate policy across a country, they’re counting on media fragmentation as cover. They’re betting no single organization can detect patterns across dozens of cities simultaneously. Until now, that bet has paid off. Not anymore.

2026 can be the year we build more shared infrastructure that makes municipal governance searchable, comparable, and trackable at national scale. As we do this, competitors can become allies. Newsrooms can scale up the process of sharing what they know.

The next Trojan Horse is already being built. The question is whether we’ll see it in time — and whether we’ll be watching alone.

I don’t think we will be.