Terry Newman: Five years after Kamloops, the church burnings haven’t stopped

A five-alarm fire tore through a vacant church and neighbouring seniors’ home in the city’s Sud-Ouest borough early Monday morning. Firefighters pass in front of the vacant St. Paul’s Catholic Church on De l’Eglise St. near Laurendeau St. in Verdun on Monday February 23, 2026. Dave Sidaway / Montreal Gazette Photo by Dave Sidaway /Montreal Gazette

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It’s been exactly five years since the shocking accusation that the remains of 215 students had been discovered on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which triggered a wave of church arsons, starting in British Columbia and spreading like wildfire across the country. While the spike has abated, churches are still burning, and almost nothing has changed. Worse, it’s not even clear that the hate directed towards churches is fuelled only by the Kamloops announcement.

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Since I last reported on the church burnings back in November 2024, at least six more churches have been destroyed and three others damaged by fire. These churches aren’t just buildings. They’re places of worship. In some cases, they’re places where generations have been baptized, married and put to rest. In the cases of those that are no longer operating as churches, some served as community centres and food banks.

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Concern for these burning churches has, so far, been less than sufficient. There’s been modest security grants for cameras, lighting and alarms at religious institutions through the Canada Community Security Program and some improved data from Statistics Canada, but what the data shows is that the investigations are going slowly, and not enough arrests are being made.

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There have been some public condemnations from politicians, but nothing that has undone the damage of former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s statement that the anger against the Catholic Church was “real and fully understandable,” implying that the potential grave sites, which have yet to be exhumed despite millions of dollars earmarked for the task, and the murderous accusation that went along with the claim, were 100 per cent verified.

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There’s been no co-ordinated national response or task force set up to investigate the church burnings; no national or regional integrated investigations unit, as suggested by a report from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. And no mandatory minimum sentences for attacking houses of worship, as advocated by the Conservatives.

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So I endeavour to update Canadians on the situation in the hope that, by understanding what these churches meant to their communities, governments will finally see this as the national emergency that it is.

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The nearly century-old All Saints Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Bellis, Alta., burned down on Sept. 21, 2025. The RCMP and fire investigators determined that an accelerant had been used and classified it as a confirmed arson. It is one of the rare cases where arrests were actually made, after the arsonists were caught by police driving stolen vehicles.

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Ash and rubble is all that remains of the All Saints Ukrainian Orthodox Church parish in Bellis, Alberta. Smokey Lake RCMP arrested three suspects, one youth, related to a crime spree and arson that burned down the church on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2025.

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The Thunderchild First Nation’s only church was broken into and then burned on Sept. 1, 2025. As with most church burnings, the case remains unsolved. It hit the church’s co-pastor, Alvina Thunderchild, especially hard. She told the press that members stood outside crying while it burned.