by
There have been over 120 reported attacks on Canadian churches – most of them Catholic – since 2021, and the ‘overwhelming majority’ are unresolved, according to The Democracy Fund.
(LifeSiteNews) — One of Canada’s top pro-democracy and freedom legal groups has announced that it has launched an independent forensic investigation, led by professionals, to look into over 120 arson and vandalism attacks on Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as synagogues, since 2021.
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 2026, 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.