Canada - 592 places of worship burned in 12 years. Liberals don't give a damn

 There have been an increasing number of arsons across Canada since 2010, peaking in 2021

A Catholic church in Morinville, Alta., burns to the ground on June 30, in what police have deemed a suspicious fire.

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There has been an epidemic of churches being set ablaze across Canada for years now — with attacks peaking after still unproven claims about graves of residential school children and a prime minister whose flippant response to the issue has done more to fan the flames against churches than quell them.

Journalists and others trying to assess the extent of arsons being committed all over the country have had few ways of stringing disparate local reports together. And, as far as we knew, the Liberal government hadn’t been able to either. It appears we were wrong. The government is, in fact, now, well aware of the number of church arsons that have been taking place across communities in Canada, and have simply chosen not to relay the severity of these attacks to Canadians.

Between 2010 and 2022, there have been a staggering 592 police-reported arsons at places of worship, including churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques, resulting in damages of at least $10,000, according to the response to an official inquiry filed by Conservative MP Marc Dalton on June 13 to the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Industry. The response came on Sept. 16.

We do not know the reasons for the wave in its entirety. What we do know is that the wave crested in 2021, jumping from 58 arsons in 2020 to 90 in 2021, following the announcement that the “confirmed” remains of 215 school children had been discovered by Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in late May of 2021, dipping back down slightly to 74 in 2022, the most recent numbers available.

Whether or not Ottawa had been quietly tracking these arsons before Dalton’s request wasn’t clear from the government’s response. What is undeniable is that the Liberals sat on this information about the frequency of these attacks on places of worship, for nearly two months, now, and likely longer. No serious announcement was made before or after this fact-finding inquiry. The public’s attention was not drawn to these alarming numbers. No special project was created or announced. The Liberals did, however, find time to make an announcement that singled-out and targeted Christian pregnancy centres.

Previous attempts have been made to keep track of all christian church arsons, desecrations, and vandalisms since 2021, in addition to what is listed here, notably by conservative media outlet True North and the Catholic Civil Rights League. To the best of my knowledge, the 110-year-old Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Allégresses in Quebec City was the latest church to have burned to the ground. It did so on Oct. 3. Whether or not it was arson is currently unknown.

As for the number of arrests related to arsons, Dalton also requested that information in his inquiry to the government, but no data was provided. According to CBC, as of January 2024, only 12 people had been charged in relation to church arsons since the start of the residential school graves controversy, with only one conviction.

One of the few times Prime Minister Justin Trudeau actually spoke about the church burnings in July 2021 he did so in his typical mealy-mouthed manner. On the one hand, he called the suspected arsons “unacceptable and wrong” while at the same time describing the likely motives for the attacks as “real and fully understandable,” empathizing with the anger against churches — a tepid discouragement, at best, of these violent attacks on Christian places of worship.

Bill C-411, a private member’s bill introduced by Dalton called the “Anti-Arson Act,” proposes to clean up the mess left behind by the prime minister’s weak response to this issue. The bill would create a new type of property offence for causing damage by fire or explosion to a place of worship. If found guilty, an individual would spend a minimum of five years in jail for a first offence and seven years for any subsequent offences. The bill would also govern response to similar crimes at synagogues and other non-Christian places of worship, which, in light of firebombings at Canadian shuls since the October 7 attacks in Israel, is a whole other conversation.

On top of these new minimums, it’s clear that Canada needs a leader who cares about violent attacks on churches and other places of worship and also keeps Canadians abreast of significant qualifications made to horrific claims.

Despite the fact that the language used by the media to describe the Kamloops site has devolved, as specific and abhorrent images of “mass graves” gradually gave way to “potential” “unmarked graves” before, finally, settling on the vague possibility of “anomalies,” the discourse surrounding the authenticity of these graves has reached a fever pitch.

Anyone who dares question the results of the ground-penetrating radar’s findings, or asks why shovels are not hitting the ground to confirm them — despite the government granting $78.3 million to do so — risks being labelled a “denialist.”

Some members of government are so passionate about Canadians and Indigenous groups never seeking out answers to what these anomalies are that they’d like to criminalize even the suggestion that these might not be graves, or that there may be some graves which are the result of epidemics of disease, rather than evidence of genocide.

There is no justice in speculation — not for the Indigenous families, nor for the families of those who worked at residential schools whose names have been dragged through the mud by these claims of mass graves. Believe it or not, the residential school system can be viewed as a terrible mistake, made by past governments and the Catholic church, without having to insist, without evidence, on something far darker.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/592-places-of-worship-burned-in-12-years-liberals-dont-give-a-damn