Written by Rebel News Staff

On Friday's episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra visited the latest mighty church to be burnt to the ground in an act of arson — and artificial intelligence tried to stop him. 

Ezra flew into Moncton, New Brunswick, then drove just over three hours to the small Acadian town of Saint-Simon — French-speaking, proud, and, until this week, home to the largest wooden church left standing in New Brunswick.

Built in 1917, the church was the heart of the community as the venue for christenings, funerals, concerts, even the local daycare. This week it burned to a crisp. Unusually, police made an arrest almost immediately: a 68-year-old local man named Gilles Mallet.

What is unusual, Ezra noted, is that most church arsons in Canada go unsolved. Police "sometimes seem like they don't even care." Not this time.

On the way out to Saint-Simon, Ezra was using Anthropic's AI app to help with research, asking it plain-language questions about the church's history and the town. It worked fine until he asked it to tell him what it knew about the accused man.

"Don't you make the accusation that it's an immigrant," the AI shot back, unprompted — even though Ezra had said nothing of the kind. When he asked the AI to pull up the accused man's public Facebook page, it refused again, calling it "muckraking," despite the page being open to the public.

But when you look up the Facebook page for yourself, it shows Mallet styling himself as an "Indigenous warrior," wearing a shirt that reads "Warrior Up" and what appears to be an Inuit-style necklace, and posting in support of a friend jailed for anti-pipeline activism.

Ezra doesn't believe Mallet is any more Indigenous than the rest of Saint-Simon — this is Acadian country. But a local man, Théo Hébert, told Ezra that Mallet's whole family had once been active in the church choir, and that Mallet, in his opinion, was mentally unwell. Apparently, he would spend much of his time in Vancouver and only returned home from time to time.

To be fair to the man: nothing here is proven. He's accused, not convicted. Motive is speculation. But the pattern around him — the costume, the sympathies, the alleged instability — raises a possibility: was this an act of vengeance against the Catholic church, in the name of Indigenous solidarity?

Ezra also spoke with Claudette, president of the parish, and with a woman named Lucy, who told him a different church down the road burned five years ago — also set, Lucy said, by someone who was mentally ill. Théo estimated dozens of church burnings across Canada; with vandalism included, the real number tops 100.

If this had been a mosque or a Sikh temple, it would be the top story in the country, with the prime minister weighing in and a police task force struck. Instead, it's a Catholic church, and the silence is deafening. It's the same silence that followed one of the largest church fires in modern Canadian history, in the heart of Toronto, that most Canadians have never heard of.

The trip cost Ezra just over $1,000 — economy airfare and a hotel — to bear witness to a story the rest of the press won't cover. If you'd like to help Rebel News keep showing up at these fires, visit SaveOurChurches.ca.

Please donate to support our investigation into Canada's church arsons!

Getting Alexandra Lavoie from Montreal to Bathurst, New Brunswick, to cover the Saint-Simon Church arson case took a puddle-jumper flight, a pricey economy fare, and — since there wasn't a rental car to be found — a taxi to finish the job. Add motels, gas, and coffee for the road, and it's clear this kind of journalism isn't cheap. Chip in to help cover our reporters' travel costs so Rebel News can keep showing up where the CBC won't.

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