Canadian official dismisses false claim 'Islamist' sparked church fire
- Published on September 12, 2025 at 20:10
- 4 min read
- By Marisha GOLDHAMER, AFP Canada
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"Another Church in Montreal has been burned by an Islamist," claims a September 4, 2025 post on TikTok.
Visuals of the fire spread across platforms and posts in multiple languages implied it was set intentionally. On X, it was amplified by an account that AFP fact-checked for pushing additional false narratives about church fires in Canada and Wales.
While many posts falsely said the church was in Montreal, a September 7 Facebook post from David Harris Jr -- a commentator supportive of US President Donald Trump whom AFP has previously fact-checked for spreading misinformation -- identifies the church as Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Allégresses in Quebec, Canada.
Keyword searches in French for information about a fire at the Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Allégresses church found multiple videos and articles from local news outlets about the October 3, 2024 blaze (archived here and here).
The clip was widely circulated on social media in 2024, identifying the building as Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Allégresses.
A search on Google Street View also found the spot in Trois-Rivières -- a city about 140 kilometers (87 miles) from Montreal in Canada's Quebec province -- from which the video of the fire was filmed.
The city published information about the fire on its website and on Facebook (archived here and here). It said the church was not in use at the time of the fire, having been deconsecrated in 2020 before being sold to a private developer.
Initial reports said that the cause of the fire was likely accidental, resulting from roof renovation work (archived here).
In response to an inquiry from AFP by email on September 10, 2025, a spokesperson for the city of Trois-Rivières said: "The fire was not criminal in nature." They said the fire safety department completed its investigation and no arrests were made in connection with the blaze.
Church fires
Several Canadian churches have suffered serious damage in fires since 2021. Both the Macdonald-Laurier Institute think tank and the Catholic Civil Rights League have been tracking fires and other acts of vandalism across Canada (archived here and here).
Multiple fires were reported following the 2021 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 found 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, but they do not indicate Christians as the main target (archived here and 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).
The peak of reports against Catholics was in 2021 (archived here).
More of AFP's reporting on misinformation in Canada is available here.
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