Built Between Elections: How the Left Out-Organizes the Right Online
By Wade MacCallum, Rogue Management
Credit Ian Willms/Getty Images
On October 24, I watched the Toronto mayoral race turn and I saw it in our data a full day before the public polls caught up. By the time the numbers were published, the side that was losing had nothing left to do but watch it happen.
Plenty of people have told me since that Toronto came down to a popular incumbent and bike lanes and there's some truth in that. What I saw that day, though, looked less like a change of mood than a machine being switched on. We identified hundreds of often influential voices arriving in a single news cycle, carrying the same few messages, right after an advocacy group told its people to move. There were likely many more behind the scenes in private groups, personal pages and similar places.
The thing is, somebody had spent years building the network that made that possible.
I should be upfront about where I stand. I vote Progressive Conservative provincially and Conservative federally, and I identify as both, which in Canada are two traditions rather than one. Rogue Management does private-industry work for clients across the political spectrum, but its political arm works only with right-of-centre organizations, by choice, for ethical and strategic reasons. So I'm partisan, and I won't pretend to be neutral, but this argument doesn't depend on my politics. It rests on public reporting and documents anyone can check, all linked below, and where a number comes from my own firm's analysis I'll say so.
The standard I'm arguing for, that people should know who is speaking and who is paying for it, applies to every side, mine included.
One more thing needs saying plainly, because it sadly gets lost whenever a Canadian writes about American politics: Canadian conservatives are not Republicans. The federal Conservatives, and provincial Progressive Conservatives like the party that governs Nova Scotia, come from their own tradition, shaped by Canadian institutions and Canadian voters, and they are not a branch office of the GOP. I'm not supporting American partisanship, and nothing here should be read as taking a side in American politics.
My point is narrower, a set of organizing and media tactics was built in the United States, proved itself there, and has now crossed the border. The comparison I'm drawing is between playbooks and infrastructure, not between parties.
Most people now get at least some of their news from social media and when creators are paid to push a party line without saying so, or partisan operations dress up as local newsrooms, the picture of public opinion people see there has been manipulated. I don't want anyone silenced, since organizing and persuasion are rights, but I do want the same truth to reach everyone with the label still on it.
What I watched in Toronto
We ran multiple campaigns in Toronto, and were at ground zero during the most pivotal week. The group at the centre of these tactics previously described was Progress Toronto, founded in 2018. Its founder became Olivia Chow's chief of staff and co-chaired her 2026 re-election campaign (Toronto Life), and its executive director has been open about the purpose: "During elections we get involved to elect progressives and then also to defeat conservatives" (CityNews).
Some call groups like this shadow parties, though a shadow party only turns up at election time and Progress Toronto never stopped working.
It was running Facebook and Instagram ads against Brad Bradford in April, months before third-party rules applied and it registered as a third-party advertiser in September. On October 23, it told its supporters, "Conservatives are mobilized so we need to get as many people out to vote as we can. The mayoral election will be close" (Progress Toronto).
We tracked the race every day by counting the unique people posting for or against each candidate over a rolling seven-day window, using public posts only, so these numbers are our own analysis. Around October 17 to 19 the conversation swung toward Bradford, and the Mainstreet and Liaison polls confirmed it a few days later.
The day after Progress Toronto's call, in a single report cycle, people posting in support of Chow jumped 76 per cent, and those posting against Bradford rose by almost half. A gap that had favoured Bradford by roughly 800 voices the day before shrank to about 100. Because each window overlaps the last by six days, a jump that large is almost all new activity in about a day. The final public polls, released on October 25, showed Chow back in front.
The themes riding that wave were the ones the Chow campaign was paying to promote. On one side, there were aggressive "stop Bradford" turnout calls and attack ads amplifying the the water-privatization charge and attempts to tie him to MAGA and to Doug Ford. On the other, union and activist mobilization.
There are documented sponsored posts reading "Don't trust Brad Bradford with our water," and "Brad Bradford will put data centres in your neighborhoods" with Chow outspending Bradford on Meta by more than two to one in one mid-October week (CBC).
We then saw the same themes repeated, unpaid, across dozens of allied pages with an expected reach of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of eyes.
My read is that the surge came from networks that already existed and that it shaped how the race closed, since persuasion rarely produces growth that quickly.
I'm highly confident that pre-existing groups drove it and only moderately confident about how much it decided the result, because this is one race and Chow had real advantages, including incumbency, union support and a largely two-way contest after Chris Alexander withdrew (The Local).
These were real people, and I'm not alleging bots or fake accounts, my question is about organization. Our listening was no more precise than a good poll, finishing about two points off the result and its real value was the day of warning it gave.
Change in positive vs negative commentary and engagements, Oct. 10 to Oct. 26. Credit: Rogue Management social listening.
Chow won 54 to 41. On election night Bradford's spokesperson said of the other side, "They know how to get them out to vote. They have union support, they're very, very organized" (CBC).
The centre-right had third-party efforts of its own, not all of them above criticism, including an anonymous site with no masthead that spent October attacking progressives (The Grind), but it had no standing organization. Progress Toronto's director described what hers can do with unusual candour, saying the group can "move two to five percent of the vote, which can be the difference" (The Local). Anyone in politics knows this is a game changing number.
Where the playbook was written
Credit: Indivisible website
None of this was invented in Toronto. The model was built in the United States over the past decade, beginning with local groups and its builders now describe it in public. Indivisible's guide for its chapters advises running, "BOTH a public Facebook page (for public events, calls to actions, etc.) and a private group (for select members, where the 'real' organizing / planning happens)" (Indivisible).
Swing Left's internal decks, published by a conservative reporter, show volunteers amplifying content through their personal accounts and local Facebook groups, with one slide noting that data "is now flowing through DDx and the DNC to state parties and campaigns" (Winters, with the slides). The reporter is partisan, but the slides speak for themselves.
Two days after the midterms, Van Jones told CNN that "the Republicans never figured out what we were doing," describing the American Accountability Network as "tens of thousands of online humans, not bots, coordinated to make the affordability message a winning message online" (Yahoo News, CNN clip). His reach figures are self-reported and unaudited, but the structure he described, real people in a standing network kept on a single economic message, is exactly what bot detection can't catch.
WIRED reported that a program called Chorus, funded by what it called "a powerful liberal dark money group," offered creators, "up to $8,000 a month to push the party line. All they have to do is keep it secret" (WIRED).
Paying creators is fine, but paying them to look independent deceives their followers about the one thing that makes the message persuasive. And it does persuade: in a pre-registered field experiment, young Americans who followed progressive creators through the 2024 campaign shifted toward more liberal positions, with effects the authors found, "exceed the impacts of traditional campaign outreach and partisan media" (arXiv).
Fake local news is the one technique where both American parties have their hands dirty, which is why the fix has to apply to everyone. Axios reported in 2024 that partisan outlets designed to look impartial had outnumbered real local daily newspapers in the U.S., with networks on both sides (Axios). NewsGuard describes the progressive Courier network as "secretly backed by millions of dollars from liberal groups" (NewsGuard), and it caught a Republican-aligned super PAC launching a Michigan site that called itself "Trusted reporting for the state of Michigan" while hiding who ran it (NewsGuard), which is every bit as deceptive as the progressive version.
It's already here - and Bill C-18 was a factor.
In 2023 Ottawa passed the Online News Act, Bill C-18, which required the big platforms to pay news publishers and that August, Meta responded by blocking news for Canadian users. A law meant to protect journalism ended with Canadians unable to share a news story on Facebook or Instagram. Yet, the 2026 Digital News Report found social media had become the country's top news source anyway, "even though, in Canada, most news media content is blocked on Facebook and Instagram" (CEM, Digital News Report Canada 2026).
The Media Ecosystem Observatory found that during the 2025 federal campaign the news block "created an information void that has, in part, been filled by less trustworthy content," with influencers rather than outlets becoming "the loudest voices in the online political information environment," though it found no material covert foreign interference (MEO report).
What I've watched since, in Toronto and now at home, is that the void didn't stay empty for long. The people quickest to fill it were left-leaning organizations that already had the pages, the lists and the volunteers. When the newsrooms were pushed off the feed, the best organized advocates were left standing in their place.
This summer in Surrey, Facebook pages posing as local news turned out to have India-based managers (Surrey Now-Leader), and Justice Marie-Josée Hogue's foreign interference inquiry concluded that information manipulation, "whether foreign or not," is "the single biggest risk to our democracy" (CBC).
A current example: Nova Scotia, my home province
What I see from here is anti-data-centre and left-leaning groups springing up with new pages, petitions and rallies each finding the last within days. That's my read, so here is the public evidence and what it doesn't show.
On October 16, EverWind Fuels announced a data centre campus at Point Tupper with Anthropic as tenant (Global News). Within a week a petition had passed 19,000 signatures (Your Halifax Now), and on November 7 rallies were held in seven communities, with Halifax drawing close to 2,000 people in the rain (Halifax Examiner). The petition passed 28,000 the next day, and the organizers posted, "Houston, we're just getting started" (Haligonia). Their demand was a moratorium on all large data centres, not just this one.
From what I watched, much of this was organized through Facebook groups and the public record backs that up. The main hub, Nova Scotia Against Data Centres, runs as a Facebook group that within two weeks was trading notes with a successful anti-data-centre campaign in Archbald, Pennsylvania (Scranton Times-Tribune). Two days before the rallies, the international environmental group Stand.earth told people to "Follow Nova Scotia Against Data Centres on Facebook on Instagram to find specific protest venues" (Stand.earth on Bluesky).
That's perfectly legitimate; Facebook groups are how this province organizes everything from hockey to church suppers.
A large group opposed to the proposed artificial intelligence data centre in southern Cape Breton demonstrating at Province House in Halifax on Nov. 7, 2026. (Vanessa Wright/CTV Atlantic)
The organizers are private citizens, and their concerns about water, power rates and environmental review are fair questions. One said "Transparency is the biggest issue of this and right now there is none," and on that we agree (Your South Shore). Nothing I've found suggests anyone in this fight is fake or being directed from outside.
My concern is with how all this looks from a distance. Nova Scotia has about 1.1 million people, so the biggest rally amounted to roughly two-tenths of one per cent of the province, and the petition is open to anyone, anywhere. Yet within four days the NDP leader was citing "hundreds of thousands" of people "engaging online" (Halifax Examiner), a measure that counts every share and comment, many from the same people.
Away from the feed, CBC found that at EverWind's first open house "opinions were mixed, but the questions were respectful" (CBC). An Angus Reid survey found 72 per cent of Atlantic Canadians want governments to limit large data centres (Your South Shore). That's real skepticism and deserves a serious answer, but limiting data centres is a long way from banning them, and I suspect most Nova Scotians sit somewhere between the two.
What makes this more than a single-issue flare-up is the coalition it landed in. Over the past year the Ecology Action Centre, the Council of Canadians, labour federations and a growing list of single-issue groups have organized rally after rally against the Houston government, on democracy, uranium, the budget, fracking and gas plants (Halifax Examiner; Ecology Action Centre).
They organize openly, under their own names, and I'd defend their right to do it. As a strategist, though, I recognize an early version of what Toronto had in 2018: a standing cross-issue network that doesn't need rebuilding each time, and that will come out of the data-centre fight larger and better listed than it went in.
Moreover, speed alone isn't proof of coordination, because real anger spreads quickly on its own. What would turn my read into a finding is public evidence such as shared administrators across supposedly separate pages or identical wording posts across groups within minutes. I haven't seen reporting that documents any of that here, and if it surfaces I'll say so.
The provincial government's response so far has mostly been rhetorical, with the premier calling blanket bans "lazy" and a PC fundraising letter promising to "overpower special interests" (Halifax Examiner). What I don't see is anyone organizing the Nova Scotians who quietly want the jobs and the investment but will never stand at a rally to say so.
What to build
Credit: Progress Toronto Website
Progress Toronto won that week because its list and its other channels were already in place when it needed them, and anyone who wants to compete has to build the same and keep it running all year rather than renting it when a race tightens. That starts with honestly branded local pages and groups, with real names on them, publishing every week so the audience already exists when the conversation turns.
Behind those channels sits one consented supporter file, sorted by riding and issue, in which every sign-up and conversation lands with consent recorded. Alongside it you want continuous listening on public posts, with an alert threshold agreed in advance and a named person who acts on it the same day.
The research is clear that people are moved most by those they know, so the next piece is a volunteer bench trained to reach their own friends in their own words. Creators belong in the mix too, with every paid relationship disclosed.
In Nova Scotia for example, that means building pages around what quieter residents care about, such as jobs and power bills, giving them an easy way to say yes, and keeping a map of the opposing coalition from public filings and co-signers. It also means answering the substance on water and power rates in public, which would do more to cool the next rally than any fundraising letter.
Judge the operation each month on opt-in supporters and on the time it takes to move from a detected shift to live creative, rather than on impressions, and keep it clean. Put your name on every page, disclose who pays for every creator and ad, and follow PIPEDA, provincial privacy law and anti-spam rules. Any conservative operation caught harvesting data without consent would hand its opponents the story of the year.
To conservative campaigns, consultants and donors
The contest has moved online and it doesn't pause between campaigns. Progressive organizers understood that years ago and built accordingly, while too many of us still fund candidates rather than capacity and lay everyone off the day after the vote. The playbook was written in the United States and Toronto has shown it works here; Nova Scotia is showing the early signs now.
I've told you where I stand politically and I'll end on the part that doesn't depend on it. Whoever fills the feed shapes what people believe everyone else thinks, and the answer to manipulated opinion is not a louder version of the same trick. It's making sure the same truth reaches everyone with the label on it, and holding ourselves to that standard first so that we have standing to ask it of others.
That's the work we do at Rogue, and it's the reason I wrote this. Progressive organizers started years ago, and there's no reason the rest of us can't start this week.
Wade MacCallum is the founder of Rogue Management, a campaign communications, research and digital firm based in Nova Scotia.
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