A view of the Vancouver skyline in British Columbia, Canada on February 11, 2009 ( AFP / DON EMMERT)

Video shows Vancouver Masonic lodge fire in 2021, not 2022

This article is more than one year old.
Published on October 13, 2022 at 19:22
2 min read
By AFP Canada

Social media posts claim that a video shows a fire at a Masonic lodge near the Canadian city of Vancouver in October 2022. This is misleading; the video does depict a fire at a Masonic lodge in North Vancouver, but it was taken in March 2021, and the city's fire chief confirmed that no such event occured this month.

"3 Masonic lodges burnt down in Greater Vancouver, Canada just yesterday," claims an October 7, 2022 tweet that has been shared thousands of times.

Screenshot of a tweet taken on October 13, 2022

The video also circulated with the same claim on Facebook in English and Spanish.

Searching for "Masonic lodges fire Vancouver" on Google brings up a March 2021 article by the Canadian public broadcaster CBC about the arrest of an alleged arsonist after 3 fires at Masonic lodges in the Metro Vancouver area.

The man, who CBC reported told the court that voices directed him to start the fires, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than 3 years in prison in November 2021.

The CBC article contains a picture that looks similar to the video shared on Twitter and the caption says the fire was in North Vancouver.

Screenshot taken on October 13, 2022 of a CBC article

Performing a Google reverse image search on a still from the video posted to Twitter brings up the website of the local outlet CityNews, dated from March 30, 2021.

The images in the CityNews video are identical to those found in the social media posts, confirming that the original video was shot in 2021, not 2022.

Screenshot of a tweet taken on October 13, 2022

Screenshot taken on October 13, 2022, of a video on citynews.ca

Asked by AFP whether such a fire had occured in Vancouver in October 2022, Karen Fry, fire chief and general manager of Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services, said in an email: "This is not accurate."

Other AFP Fact Check articles about Canada can be found here.

Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.

E-mail