Another week, another church burned to the ground in Canada
Fire engulfed a church in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, at around two in the morning on October 1st.
Another church has burned to the ground in Canada. All Saints Orthodox Church in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, built in 1958 by Ukrainian settlers. It went up at about two in the morning on October 1st, the night of Truth and Reconciliation Day.
I flew to Saskatoon and drove another three hours north to see it for myself. There’s almost nothing left. Scorched remains of the walls behind yellow police tape.
It’s a small city — the courthouse is right across the street and the RCMP detachment is a couple of hundred yards away. And that very day, parishioners had been out front repainting the steps.
Here is what the RCMP told us, word for word. Investigators are “working to identify the cause and origin of the fire,” and police have “no further information to share at this time, including any speculation as to whether the fire is suspicious or not.”
Fair enough.
But the yellow police tape is still up, days later. You don’t keep a crime-scene perimeter around an accident. We’ve asked both the police and the fire chief, in writing, whether they think it was arson. No answer yet.
It’s the third church fire in this one corner of Saskatchewan in four years. In 2022, Meadow Lake RCMP called a church fire on Waterhen Lake First Nation suspicious.
In September 2024, St. George Anglican in Loon Lake, built in 1939, burned to the ground, and a man was charged with arson. And when I googled the name of this church, the first result was a different All Saints Ukrainian Orthodox church, in Bellis, Alberta, nearly a century old, burned to the ground in September 2025. Three people charged, including with arson. That’s how tall the pile has grown. You search for one burned church and you find another.
Well over a hundred churches have been vandalized or burned in Canada since 2021. Imagine a hundred mosques. It would lead every newscast. There’d be a joint task force of the RCMP, CSIS and local police. The prime minister would make a national, televised address.
Instead, silence. The CBC, probably the only big outlet with any reach up there, ran nothing on Meadow Lake for days. And not a word from the politicians who never miss a chance to condemn hate against everyone except Christians.
Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s right-hand man, once called church burnings “understandable.” That’s the political class. And this fire came on the one day a year when churches are most loudly blamed for genocide.
Meadow Lake borders the Flying Dust First Nation. White and Indigenous neighbours have lived side by side there for more than a century. In the hours after the fire, people came by the ruins, almost to pay their respects. Several were Indigenous. One couple told me they believed it was arson.
A church in a town of five thousand isn’t just a place to pray. It’s a daycare, a school, a concert hall. It’s where the weddings are, and the funerals. Seventy years of that vanished overnight. Nobody came to bear witness. Not the media, not the government. Except us.
That’s why Rebel News goes to every church burning in Canada. Because the rest of the media won’t, and we need to document this crime wave. But it isn’t cheap. This trip, the flight to Saskatoon, the rental car cost nearly $1,000.
Rebel News doesn’t take a dime of Mark Carney’s media bailout. If we did, we wouldn’t be allowed to cover this story the way it deserves. But it means the bill lands on us, and on readers like you.
When the police finally say what caused this fire, somebody has to be there to ask the next question. Who? Why this church, on this day, and not the two others down the road? And when the next church burns, and there will be a next one, somebody has to get on a plane.
If you want that to be us, please chip in at SaveOurChurches.ca. Whatever you can spare, $10 or $20, goes to getting a reporter to Meadow Lake and to the next one, which. Sadly, there is sure to be a next one.
Ezra Levant
Rebel Commander
Ezra Levant is the founder and owner of Rebel News and the host of The Ezra Levant Show. He is the author of multiple best-selling books, including Ethical Oil, The Libranos, China Virus, and most recently, Trudeau's Secret Plan.