Anti-Muslim posts misrepresent old footage of lightning-sparked Canadian church fire

“BREAKING NEWS: This is another Church burned down in Canada by Muslim immigrant sponsored by 'Liberal Government in Canada',” reads the caption of a Facebook post published on August 9, 2026. 

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Screenshot showing the false post, taken August 12, 2026

Attached to the post are screenshots of a fire engulfing a church spire that led to its collapse. 

Conservative US commentator David Harris Jr, who has also shared several false claims debunked by AFP Fact Check, amplified the claim on Facebook and implied the fire had just taken place.

The video and screengrabs spread across Facebook, X, Instagram and Threads in several languages, including French, Spanish, Vietnamese and Haitian Creole. Some posts claimed the purported arson was the result of "Islamisation," while others called for a stop to "Christian genocide".

AFP Fact Check has repeatedly fact-checked similar misinformation about "Islamists" and migrants starting church fires in the United Kingdom and Canada.

Some August 2026 posts pushing the claim about "Islamist immigrants" burning a church misused different footage of a 2024 incident in Quebec -- an allegation that AFP Fact Check previously debunked after officials ruled that the fire was an accident. 

The images of the crumpling spire are similarly misrepresented. 

Reverse image searches revealed that the incident happened more than a year ago and shows the Église de l'Immaculée-Conception, which burned down on July 17, 2025, in Saint-Ours, Quebec, about 80 kilometres (50 miles) northeast of Montreal (archived here).

The city of Saint-Ours rejected the claim that the blaze was started intentionally by a Muslim immigrant.

"The fire was caused by a lightning strike during the severe thunderstorms that hit the region that evening," Saint-Ours general director Pascale Dalcourt told AFP Fact Check in an August 10, 2026, email (archived here).

A Saint-Ours press release and news reports from the time further confirm that lightning started the fire (archived here and here). 

Dalcourt also shared a screenshot of a weather map showing the observed lightning activity from July 17, 2025, with a strike blasting the church's former location in the centre of town (archived here).

Several Canadian churches have suffered serious damage from fires since 2021, with the most recent taking place in April 2026 at a deconsecrated structure in Saint-Romain, Quebec (archived here and here).

Multiple fires were reported following the 2021 revelation that ground-penetrating radar detected possible human remains at the former Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia, one of several Catholic boarding schools set up a century ago in Canada to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children (archived here and here).

A CBC News investigation found 33 churches had burned down between May 2021 and December 2023, with only two ruled accidental. Fourteen of those fires took place on reserves and in First Nations.

Data from Statistics Canada shows a peak of 155 police-reported hate crimes targeting Catholics in 2021, but it does not indicate that Christians have been the main target of such offences in recent years. 

In 2025, the government agency reported that about three percent of religiously motivated, police-reported hate crimes in Canada targeted Catholics, while 71 percent were directed at Jews and 18 percent at Muslims (archived here). 

Read more of AFP Fact Check's reporting on misinformation in Canada here.