Canadian group launches independent forensic investigation into widespread church burnings

In a press release sent to LifeSiteNews, The Democracy Fund’s (TDF) Executive Director Mark Joseph said that this investigation is the first of its kind and comes after government inaction on the matter.

“Canadians have witnessed a sharp increase in church and synagogue fires and vandalism over the past decade. The overwhelming majority of these attacks are unresolved,” he said.

“Numbering in the hundreds and bearing clear hallmarks of targeted action, the response from the government and authorities has been almost nonexistent.”

Joseph added that for “years,” Canadians have “watched churches burn” while authorities “offered little transparency, few answers, and almost no accountability.”

He said the investigation is designed to establish “what happened, determine whether these incidents were properly investigated, and expose any systemic failures that allowed this crisis to persist.”

In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some Canadian residential schools. The reality is that, after four years, there have been no mass graves discovered at residential schools.

However, as the claims went unfounded, since the spring of 2021, over 120 churches, most of them Catholic, many of them on indigenous lands that serve the local population, have been burned to the ground, vandalized, or defiled in Canada. Also, there has been a rise in attacks against synagogues as well, mainly due to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

One of the most recent churches to burn down was the historic St. Paul’s Catholic church in Montreal, Canada, which, in February 2o26, was reduced to near rubble in a huge blaze, the cause of which investigators still have not determined.

In 2024, retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht said that Canadians are being “deliberately deceived by their own government” after blasting the former Trudeau government for “actively pursuing” a policy that blames the Catholic Church for the unfounded “deaths and secret burials” of indigenous children.

The Canadian media has been rather silent on the church burnings, as has the ruling Liberal federal government.

Indeed, as reported by LifeSiteNews, Canada’s Public Safety Minister, Gary Anandasangaree, admitted that he has yet to meet with anyone from the over 123 churches that have been either reduced to ashes or seriously vandalized over the past four years.

Investigators to compile public report to determine whether to take ‘legal action’ against officials

According to the TDF, the investigator will work with an ATIP (access to information & privacy) specialist to obtain some to 100 investigation reports that fire officials filed about the attacks on churches.

The expert will be tasked with examining to see if the fires were investigated properly by officials, and “whether the pattern of destruction indicates an organized or ideologically motivated campaign, and whether Canadian authorities responded according to international standards.”

Once completed, the findings will be compiled into a public report, which “may inform future legal action, public advocacy efforts, and formal demands for government accountability.”

Canadian indigenous residential schools, run by the Catholic Church and other Christian groups, were set up by the federal government and were open from the late 19th century until 1996.

While there were indeed some Catholics who committed serious abuses against native children, the unproven “mass graves” narrative has led to widespread anti-Catholic sentiment since 2021.