Man charged with burning down historic New Brunswick church as social media posts raise new questions
The historic Saint-Simon church burned to the ground in two hours. Now a parishioner faces an arson charge, while his social media history and a another video of the fire raise new questions.
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Article by Rebel News staff
Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show: a historic New Brunswick church is burned to the ground, and a local parishioner is charged with arson. On his Facebook page, he celebrates a friend jailed for fighting a pipeline. Then, in another video of the burning church, a voice calls out that friend’s name and says, “Your wish has come true.”
Saint-Simon is a small Acadian fishing village on New Brunswick's north shore. Until August 24 it had a 109-year-old church, built by the great-grandparents of people who still live there. The largest wooden church left in the province.
The alarm sounded around 3:30 a.m. Four fire departments responded. It was too late. The building was wood and it was gone in two hours. Only the chimney stands. The fire marshal says arson.
Claudette is co-president of the parish council. She cried when the steeple came down. Standing in the ashes, she asked why.
"He took away our church, that person. Why? Especially since he was a parishioner of our parish."
The RCMP moved fast. Within hours they charged Gilles Mallet, 68, a local man and a parishioner of the church he is accused of burning. His bail hearing in Bathurst on Friday, Aug. 28 did not finish. It resumes Monday, Sept. 7.
The charge is unproven. Mallet has not entered a plea. A publication ban covers the bail hearing, so Rebel News cannot report what was said in that courtroom.
Everyone in Saint-Simon offered the same explanation. One troubled man, nothing bigger. That may be right. But Mallet's Facebook page is public, and it shows a man who spent years inside a political movement two provinces away.
His profile picture shows him beside a war canoe named Chief Dan George, on a trailer marked Takaya Tours, the tourism company of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation. His shirt reads "Warrior Up! Ta'ah said." Ta'ah is Amy George, Chief Dan George's daughter, who coined the phrase in 2012 against the Kinder Morgan pipeline. It became the rallying cry of the B.C. anti-pipeline movement.
A reader who knew Mallet from an Indigenous community near Lillooet, B.C., where Mallet lived for years, pointed Rebel News to the page. He said he had left that community himself over what was being said there about Christians and the Church. Mallet stayed.
On March 1, 2025, Mallet posted: "In honour of my friend Stacy Gallagher who's in jail because of his fights against the pipeline."
Gallagher is a B.C. pipeline protester with a criminal record. On March 2, 2021, Justice Shelley Fitzpatrick sentenced him to 90 days for criminal contempt after he defied an injunction at Trans Mountain's Burnaby terminal. He was released on bail pending appeal the next day. Rebel News cannot confirm he was in custody in 2025. That is Mallet's description.
There is a video on Mallet's timeline of the church burning, filmed from the road as the fire trucks arrive. Mallet did not post it. An acquaintance uploaded it around Aug. 30, while Mallet was in custody. A man behind the camera says: "Stacey Gallagher, your wish has come true."
Rebel News has reviewed the audio. What that line means is unknown. Who said it is unknown. Whether the speaker has ever met Gallagher is unknown. It is a question, not an answer, and it is one no police force or news organization has asked out loud.
The same source provided photographs from a Sundance ceremony in the B.C. Interior this August, identifying Gallagher in the foreground. An earlier photograph from the same ceremony appears to show Mallet in the back row. Rueben George, who has led the Tsleil-Waututh fight against Trans Mountain for years, is identified by the source among those present. He is not accused of anything.
An anonymous commenter on Mallet's page has written that Mallet was manipulated and had said in advance what he intended to do. The comment is unverified and its text is cut off mid-sentence. It is worth checking. It is not evidence.
So what is left is this. A church is ashes. A parishioner is charged. And the man charged spent years wearing the slogan of a movement whose grievance against the Catholic Church has been endorsed at the highest levels of Canadian government.
More than a hundred churches have been burned or vandalized in Canada since 2021, after the claim that 215 children's remains had been detected at the former Kamloops residential school. Not one has been excavated. Justin Trudeau told the country it had committed genocide. His former principal secretary, Gerald Butts, called the burnings "understandable." Nobody in power ever said stop. Saint-Simon is what that costs.
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COMMENTS
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John Williams commented 2026-09-04 00:37:58 -0400 FlagThe insane racism some Indigenous people have towards Whites and Catholics has been whipped up by Wokism is sad and dangerous.
The left have caused the right to burn Churches with their self hatred. Its time to stop this insanity and we should be proud we were the ones who stopped slavery
in the modern world. -
Peter Wrenshall commented 2026-09-03 21:30:40 -0400Burning churches has become a popular form of political expression on the Left in Canada.
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Jane Vandervliet commented 2026-09-03 21:26:40 -0400Anyone who follows American news should know by now that COVID-19 was a gain-of-function research project virus funded by the American government’s NIAID (under Anthony Fauci) that escaped from the Wuhan Lab in China. The vaccine that was supposed to stop it was in the pipeline at the same time also under Fauci’s control. The whole world believed the US was honest in science and so fell for the evil plan. It is long past time for the world to sue the pants of the US government.
The Republicans who brought this out to the public are appreciated by truth lovers.
The Canadian government including the opposition parties, the health care system and the mainstream media were and most still are in denial of the truth of Covid’s origin. They really aught the get their heads out of their backsides and start caring for the people they allowed the US to kill and/or injure. Shame on the whole evil lot of them. -
Bruce Atchison commented 2026-09-03 21:21:53 -0400 FlagYou don’t see blind and visually-impaired folks burning down churches. That’s because we want to join society, not force it to do what we say. These sore-loser natives can’t do like Devo sang and “give the past the slip.” Along with their leftist rable rousers, these folks figure they can take revenge for their ancestors. But those who seek revenge must dig two graves.
The gas-lighting of COVID is just another reason for Albertans to vote to secede from confederation. Sure Jason Kenny resisted the vax passports for a while but Ottawa obviously pressured him to enact that horrid plan. It’s time to form the sovereign nation of Buffalo. -
Paul Scofield commented 2026-09-03 20:56:31 -0400 FlagGee, another public service announcement from nutcases on the Canadian Left: fools, fire and churches do not mix. At least, for a change, the arsonist was not reported to have been yelling “Allahu Akbar” or acting as a twenty-something morally superior shill for the LPC.
