Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Monday that Christians and their places of worship are being targeted and, if elected, he will crack down on religion-based hate through tougher sanctions for crimes like arson.
Speaking to reporters at an announcement on food inflation, Poilievre said he has watched with alarm at the “terrible” spate of church burnings, incidents he described as “terrorist attacks” directed at Christians.
“One hundred churches have been burned,” Poilievre said. “Christians may be the number 1 group that are victims of hate-based violence. But, of course, it’s not politically correct to say that.”
According to the most recent Statistics Canada data, the majority of hate crimes targeting a religion reported by police in 2023 were directed at Jews (70 per cent) and Muslims (16 per cent).
There were a total of 1,284 hate crimes targeting a religion that year — a sharp 67 per cent increase from 2022, and a phenomenon largely driven by more police-reported incidents against Jewish (900 hate crimes) and Muslim (211) communities.
Statistics Canada does show there was an uptick in hate crimes directed at Catholics in 2021 — religion-based violence that came after the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation said preliminary findings from a radar survey of the grounds of the former Catholic-run Kamloops Indian Residential School indicated as many as 215 children could be buried on the site.
There were 43 police-reported crimes targeting Catholics in 2020, according to Statistics Canada data, and that figure jumped to 155 the year after. Since then, the number of crimes against Catholics has dropped.
Poilievre suggests Christians face the most ‘hate-based violence’
Still, there are other signs that Christians and their churches are being targeted.
Last week, a century-old Ukrainian Orthodox Church northeast of Edmonton was torched during what police described as a crime spree — the latest in a series of arson attacks.
According to media reports, at least four other churches have seen set ablaze so far this year, including vacant churches in Winnipeg and Newfoundland, a Catholic church in rural Saskatchewan and a joint Anglican-Lutheran church in Manitoba.
It is hard to pinpoint just how many churches have been torched or defaced in recent years but there are some data points to suggest it’s a relatively common occurrence.
A recent report from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, citing data tabled by the government in the House of Commons, found 238 arson attacks on churches and other religious institutions between 2021 and 2023 — up from 152 in the prior three-year period.
Institutions in the Prairies and B.C. were disproportionately affected by arson during that time period, the report found.
CBC News probed some Canadian church burnings carried out between 2021 and 2023 and found 33 such incidents. Fourteen of those fires took place on First Nations reserves and 13 were in small or rural towns.
The Catholic Civil Rights League, which maintains a church attacks database, has documented dozens of suspicious incidents in recent years.
Poilievre said “this anti-Christian hate needs to stop,” and he pledged a tougher criminal stance to try and tamp it out, including mandatory prison terms for extortionists, stronger laws against hate crimes, the deportation of foreign criminals and more resources for police and border services.
“Frankly, Canadians of all faiths, including Christians, deserve to worship in peace,” he said.
