Church fire in Canada blamed without evidence on Muslims

"Another church is burned down in Canada by some Muslims," says an August 31, 2025 post on Threads.

The post includes a video of smoke rising from a building, which it identifies as St. Anne's Anglican Church in Toronto. It concludes: "Christianity is under attack in Canada!"

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Screenshot of a Threads post taken September 4, 2025

The video and language was lifted from an X account that AFP previously fact-checked for amplifying false accusations blaming migrants for a separate church fire in Wales.

The claim also spread on Instagram and Facebook, including in other languages such as Burmese.

Keyword searches for details on the fire bring up local news videos and articles indicating that the Toronto blaze broke out on June 9, 2024 (archived here and here). 

It is unclear why the video resurfaced more than a year after the church -- which housed priceless artwork and was designated a national historic site of Canada -- was heavily damaged in the four-alarm fire (archived here). No injuries were reported, and police initially told the CBC that the cause was not "considered suspicious" (archived here and here).

On September 4, 2025, officials told AFP they are still investigating the cause, origin and circumstances of the fire.

"At this time, no determination of cause has been established and the final report has not been made," the Ontario Office of the Fire Marshal said in an email (archived here). 

Shannon Eames, media relations officer for the Toronto Police Service, added that no arrests have been made as the investigation remains ongoing (archived here).

St. Anne's also said it is awaiting a report from officials.

Reverend Judith Alltree told AFP in a September 4 email that the case shows people will post "whatever they believe on the internet; we are still waiting on the truth." (archived here).

2021 arson

AFP could not independently confirm the widely cited figure of more than 100 incidents at churches, which is generally credited to a calculation by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a think tank (archived here). 

Local media did report on a series of vandalism and arson incidents at churches across Western Canada in 2021. This followed the public revelation that a ground-penetrating radar survey detected possible human remains at the former Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia, one of several Catholic boarding schools set up a century ago to forcibly assimilate the country's indigenous peoples (archived here and here).

CBC News reported that 33 churches had burned down between May 2021 and December 2023, with only two ruled accidental. Of those fires, 14 took place on reserves and First Nations. 

Data from Statistics Canada shows that police-reported hate crimes targeting a religion rose sharply in 2023 and remained high in 2024 (archived here).

"The majority of hate crimes targeting a religion reported by police in 2023 were directed at the Jewish (70 percent) and Muslim (16 percent) populations," it said, following a pattern seen in other countries after the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel and the resulting war in Gaza (archived here, here and here).

More of AFP's reporting on misinformation in Canada is available here.