Juno News - February 27, 2026


Historic Montreal church DESTROYED in massive fire

Topics
church burnings in Canada
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Dimpy Brar Glenn Beck Terry Newman Petroni Antifa Arson Trump
Carney PANICS as Liberal cabinet ministers EXPOSE their radical agenda CBC pushes unbelievable propaganda + THIS is what happens when you don’t vet immigrants

Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

163.81

Word count

2,852

Sentence count

214

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

This week, a church in Montreal was destroyed in a mysterious fire, and the number of church burnings in Canada continues to rise. This week, writer Dimpy Brar asks whether the fires are an attack on Christians, or an assault on Western society.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, this week saw the devastation of another historic Catholic church in Canada.
00:00:10.160 You can read that story at JunoNews.com.
00:00:13.820 Montreal's St. Paul's was gutted in yet another unexplained church fire.
00:00:24.140 The massive five-alarm blaze broke out early Monday morning.
00:00:28.800 Eyewitnesses say only the stone facade was left standing.
00:00:33.360 St. Paul's church finished construction in 1911 and had been designated a heritage site.
00:00:40.380 Police say the cause of the blaze remains unknown.
00:00:43.500 How many times have we heard that from authorities after a church fire in Canada?
00:00:48.040 Literally dozens of times.
00:00:50.080 It's just the latest in a long series of church printings dating back to 2021.
00:00:54.560 The fires exploded in number after May of that year, after a First Nations group announced the discovery of a suspected mass grave site at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
00:01:09.540 As this map shows, the fires spread from one end of the country to the other after that announcement.
00:01:18.160 As of today, though, no remains of any bodies have been found at that residential school site.
00:01:25.040 But the church burnings continue.
00:01:26.880 Now, writer Dimpy Brar sees it not just as an attack on Christians, but as an assault on Western society.
00:01:35.460 You can read her article in Blaze Media next week.
00:01:39.660 Dimpy Brar joins us on Straight Up.
00:01:41.960 Welcome, Dimpy.
00:01:42.980 Hi there, Mr. Petroni.
00:01:44.380 How are you?
00:01:45.200 Good.
00:01:46.120 This mark is fine.
00:01:47.480 Tell us a little bit about your article.
00:01:49.620 What drew you to this topic of the church burnings in Canada?
00:01:53.900 So I've really been running on a theme.
00:01:56.220 I'm director of engagement for an organization called Allies for a Strong Canada.
00:02:00.760 And one of the reasons why I love working with them, why I'm proud to do so, is because I think this is a Western civilization issue.
00:02:07.740 It's no longer really left or right to me anymore.
00:02:10.540 It's beyond liberal and conservative.
00:02:12.360 It's really the West against everyone else, which I take to be good versus evil. 0.85
00:02:16.640 And what made the church burnings peculiarly interesting to me was the following.
00:02:22.460 One, our prime minister has not said a word about them.
00:02:26.440 And we know that if it were happened to be, let's say, a mosque, that there would probably be some comments being made, probably a commission, probably an investigative report.
00:02:37.520 But instead, what we get is this antiseptic prose, you know, a suspected arson, a fire has broken out as if somehow they spontaneously combusted and no one was involved.
00:02:50.620 And when I see the media do that in Canada, I don't just see cowardice.
00:02:55.280 I see something akin to a kind of complicity here.
00:02:58.140 What worries me is that young Canadians today, even their American counterparts, when they hear something like this, they are getting an education of sorts.
00:03:10.380 So what they're being educated right now is that nothing is really sacred in this country anymore.
00:03:15.900 There's nothing really high above you.
00:03:17.640 And if a church is burning, what's the difference between a church burning and a Walmart burning?
00:03:22.080 It's just property damage, really.
00:03:23.760 But a civilization that fails to distinguish between those two, which is essentially a civilization that fails to distinguish between high and low, noble, ignoble, good, evil, that's a civilization which is turning against itself.
00:03:37.600 And as a creature of Western civilization, I'm not going to tolerate that.
00:03:41.360 So I thought I just have to keep writing about it and I have to keep writing it to anyone who will listen.
00:03:46.460 I fundamentally believe that the people of this country are largely in agreement on this position.
00:03:53.360 It's just unfortunate that our elites are not.
00:03:57.260 Yeah, I mean, I think there's been over 120 fires.
00:04:01.400 Yes.
00:04:02.080 And I think that since the discovery of this site that some believe is a mass grave site and yet no remains have been found.
00:04:13.040 And so the numbers have really exploded.
00:04:16.260 But you have other numbers that are particularly troubling as well.
00:04:21.080 Not just fires, but acts of, you know, vandalizing these churches.
00:04:26.680 Yes, according to a National Post article that I was reading by Terry Newman, I believe, she had pointed out that the number was upwards of 530.
00:04:36.100 Now, she was including both burnings, vandalizing, and guttings.
00:04:41.360 And she included other temples, churches, mosques, and synagogues.
00:04:48.000 But of course, what is the largest majority of those, the brunt of those remain to be churches.
00:04:53.680 The interesting part about this whole Kamloops grave site issue is that the residential schools kind of give it a pretense.
00:05:01.680 If you recall, Prime Minister Trudeau, when this information was first revealed, he said, I believe the phrase was, it was understandable, given what was happening in the residential schools.
00:05:13.400 Now, as you pointed out, there's been no discovery.
00:05:17.260 There's been no excavations.
00:05:20.800 In fact, some of these groups won't even let us onto the properties to see what's really going on there.
00:05:26.960 And yet the churches are still burning.
00:05:29.300 So that, to me, signals that this is way beyond a policy protest.
00:05:33.920 This is part of a larger revolution against Western civilization that's taking place right now.
00:05:39.380 And it's not just Canada.
00:05:41.300 It'll be the United States. 0.91
00:05:42.840 And if anyone noticed over the weekend, there were also churches burnt in England.
00:05:48.020 Yeah, I mean, Trudeau used the word genocidal in his description based on just the discovery of the site,
00:05:56.220 which, again, has turned up no remains up to this point.
00:06:00.840 And it's been years and millions of dollars has been spent looking for it.
00:06:04.780 And the implication of his words, understandable, suggests that the fires were justifiable.
00:06:11.780 I mean, that's what I take when he says understandable.
00:06:15.020 I say, it sounds to me like you think it was justified.
00:06:19.160 And so, yeah, I mean, then that's what we saw.
00:06:21.860 It was like almost a red flag in front of a bull, which is to say, go for it.
00:06:27.660 You know, if you want to burn a church, hey, you know, we won't come after you.
00:06:31.820 It seems to be that way because there's been no arrests.
00:06:36.900 I mean, if there's been investigations in these fires, they've turned up absolutely nothing.
00:06:40.960 And this is after dozens and dozens of these.
00:06:44.580 So talk about the conspiracy that you see unfolding here.
00:06:49.560 Who's you know who's behind it and why?
00:06:52.200 Well, that's a very interesting question.
00:06:55.080 That's another thing that I have noticed is totally absent from the mainstream media.
00:06:59.240 The mainstream media otherwise can be full of questions, investigations, primetime specials, and pushing for commissions on various other problems.
00:07:09.940 On this, they're notably silent.
00:07:12.580 So that is another question that I'm very interested in.
00:07:15.220 Who is behind this?
00:07:17.300 And in Canada, the problem is it could be a multitude of different groups.
00:07:21.620 They all share and they express anti-Western hatred, but it could be a number.
00:07:26.820 For instance, we have Antifa groups present all over this country, and they are quite popular and powerful.
00:07:34.420 There was a previous report, actually, that there was major support by certain Antifa members and groups in the United States who were none other than members of Canadian unions.
00:07:46.360 So they were either getting trained in Canada or they were Canadians themselves.
00:07:50.620 Now, no one's really been looking into that as well.
00:07:54.400 And we don't know if it could be other religious minorities.
00:07:58.820 We don't know if it could even be other foreign entities.
00:08:03.100 Canada, especially under Justin Trudeau, has essentially become a kind of grounding for extrajudicial killings, whether that's from China, India, Iran.
00:08:16.180 Again, it could be a multitude of actors.
00:08:18.860 But the incredible part is, is that no one's even bothering to ask the question.
00:08:23.220 And when they're not willing to ask the question, that's what raises my suspicions to me, that there is something there that they do not want to be revealed.
00:08:30.860 So to me, it's less of a conspiracy and more so just an investigation into the truth, which is, again, something we used to revere in this country.
00:08:39.480 I mean, it's quite disturbing to see what has happened.
00:08:44.360 And then when you tie it into the government's actions, like their own actions, you have to wonder what ties there are to the Liberal Party and to the left in general.
00:08:54.940 You mentioned Antifa and there may be other groups.
00:08:58.060 They obviously have money behind them.
00:09:00.320 Where is that money coming from?
00:09:02.180 Who is investigating?
00:09:03.060 I mean, in the United States, there are investigations in place to see who, for instance, is behind the attacks on ICE officers as they try to do their job.
00:09:14.080 You get these paid mobs and Trump asked a question and his DOJ is investigating and where that money is coming from.
00:09:21.560 But you see nothing like that in Canada.
00:09:23.720 They don't want to talk about it.
00:09:25.340 They don't want to.
00:09:27.100 I don't know.
00:09:27.980 They just don't want to go there.
00:09:29.220 And that is troubling to me because, you know, Canadians are watching this go on and they're starting to wonder, you know, who's behind it and why nothing has been done about it up to this point.
00:09:42.340 And to your point earlier, yeah, if this was a mosque, if this was some other place of faith for some other group, yeah, there would be outrage. 0.99
00:09:51.080 You know, there would be cries of Islamophobia and all the sort of thing.
00:09:54.900 That would happen in a minute if that were to happen at a mosque. 0.97
00:09:59.220 And yet we see nothing said about these attacks on Christian facilities and institutions and churches.
00:10:07.680 And so there's obviously a double standard here.
00:10:10.740 And frankly, I don't see or hear a whole lot of talk about it from any of the parties, any of the other mainstream parties.
00:10:18.100 You know, somebody needs to stand up and say this, say something and speak about this.
00:10:22.100 I mean, I don't want to say that all the fires were suspicious, that all the fires were set intentionally, but we're seeing a pattern here.
00:10:31.440 We're seeing a trend and that needs to be investigated.
00:10:34.200 What say you?
00:10:34.800 Oh, I absolutely agree.
00:10:37.860 One church is one thing.
00:10:39.380 Ten churches is something.
00:10:41.180 Over 80 since 2021.
00:10:43.860 That is a campaign.
00:10:45.400 It's a reason why I don't like the language use either of arson.
00:10:49.060 Arson to me or being set ablaze is one thing.
00:10:52.700 To me, these are acts of terrorism.
00:10:54.920 And again, since we're not even investigating them, there's no commissions or an attempt to look at it.
00:10:59.500 We don't know what it is.
00:11:00.740 No one's even bothering to ask.
00:11:02.300 And again, I have to say, this is not a matter of left or right, liberal or conservative.
00:11:09.240 This is the West against everybody else. 0.94
00:11:11.660 This is a pattern that we are seeing across Europe.
00:11:14.000 We are seeing this in the United States.
00:11:15.980 Not so much, of course, because they have President Trump right now.
00:11:18.940 But we're seeing it in Canada.
00:11:20.660 This is a much broader pattern of behavior.
00:11:23.260 And I must say that I am quite disappointed as well that the opposition is not raising more questions about this, especially in the context of, again, anti-Western hatred.
00:11:35.540 This is something real that's happening.
00:11:37.940 You know, they're not targeting liquor stores or shopping malls or banks.
00:11:42.960 They're targeting churches.
00:11:44.600 And that is not accidental.
00:11:47.080 Churches used to be, at least in the West, they are a claim to the truth.
00:11:52.260 Churches stand above us.
00:11:54.460 Churches point to something that's higher than us, that there is a God that we answer to, that there is an order in this world, and it's accessible to all men.
00:12:02.800 Now, this is something that is essentially a living rebuke to the kind of nihilists and relativists who are really taking a hold here and trying to push against the West.
00:12:12.040 For them, they see them as a testifying to the idea that there is a good life, that there is something best, that there is something high, and that there is something great.
00:12:20.360 They cannot stand that.
00:12:21.680 And when they cannot argue against it, they set it ablaze.
00:12:25.160 But I must say, if you permit me, I do see a silver lining in some of this.
00:12:30.900 There is something to be said about the fact that if they really, if these people or these groups really believed that the churches were really just dead,
00:12:39.980 and they could just be turned into condos and emptied out, there would be no real need to set them on fire.
00:12:47.320 By setting them on fire, they're actually testifying to the vitality of Western civilization.
00:12:52.480 You know, we've really forgotten how revolutionary and radical we are as a civilization.
00:12:57.660 And the very fact that they see us as a threat, to me, is a signal and a call to my fellow countrymen and other members of Western civilization,
00:13:06.060 that if this is still such a threat to the worst people, to the greatest kind of tyranny that we're facing right now,
00:13:12.200 that is absolutely something worth defending, fighting, and believing in.
00:13:15.800 Yeah, absolutely.
00:13:18.040 And there is a religious component to this.
00:13:21.120 I mean, we have a party in Ottawa that seems to have its targets set on the Christian faith.
00:13:29.560 I mean, let's call it what it is here.
00:13:31.920 There was the summer jobs issue where they deliberately targeted groups that were, for instance, pro-life,
00:13:40.280 that didn't qualify for that program.
00:13:43.660 Now we have proposed legislation that might label elements of the Bible as hateful, as including hateful language.
00:13:52.840 And so there's something going on here.
00:13:55.500 These people clearly don't like Christians.
00:13:58.160 I mean, let's just call it what it is. 0.59
00:14:00.260 They don't like Christians. 1.00
00:14:02.260 And, you know, they may try to cover that up, but it oozes out of their pores every time they do things like this,
00:14:09.880 like come out and describe elements of the Bible as hate.
00:14:14.240 You know, and so, you know, Canadians need to wake up and see what's going on around them.
00:14:20.960 And I think most of them, sadly, from what I've been able to see, I mean, are just not cluing in,
00:14:29.900 or there's some kind of inability to process what is going on in front of them.
00:14:35.100 You know, maybe they're just so busy trying to put food on the table.
00:14:40.100 You know, maybe they're just struggling just to pay their mortgage, put gas in the car, you know,
00:14:45.540 and maybe get something for their kid at Christmas or a birthday.
00:14:49.640 They're struggling so much dealing with the economic pressures of living in this country
00:14:54.140 that they don't have time to look carefully at the attacks on speech
00:14:59.020 and at the attacks on people of faith in this country.
00:15:04.400 And something needs to be done about it.
00:15:06.280 So your article is coming out next week in the Blaze Media, correct?
00:15:10.800 Yes, absolutely.
00:15:12.700 Right.
00:15:13.200 And is Glenn Beck going to have you on the show or?
00:15:17.020 Oh, my gosh.
00:15:18.860 From your lips, I was about to say to God's ears, but to Glenn Beck's ears, that would be wonderful.
00:15:25.060 Look, everything you said about it being targeted towards Christianity is very, very real.
00:15:30.260 The roots of Western civilization can be understood as two cities in particular, Jerusalem and Athens.
00:15:36.460 Athens gives us philosophy.
00:15:38.300 Jerusalem gives us revelation.
00:15:40.140 And that Jerusalem is the Jerusalem of Judaism and Christianity.
00:15:43.860 Why is Christianity so difficult and why is it such a problem and an obstacle for these people? 1.00
00:15:49.200 Because Christianity tells us what Genesis told us, which is that all men are created equal.
00:15:54.000 These tyrants do not believe all men are created equal.
00:15:56.680 They believe in a hierarchy of gender, sex, race, and they are utterly unequal.
00:16:04.820 So to them, that idea is the most dangerous, radical thought there is.
00:16:08.420 And quite frankly, I am, I take it as a backhanded compliment that they take it to be such a threat today.
00:16:15.200 How do people get in touch with you or find out more about the work that you're doing?
00:16:19.480 Oh, well, I'm on Twitter at is this dimpy bee.
00:16:23.540 And you can also email me at d-i-m-p-e-e at theallies.ca and also sign up for theallies.ca.
00:16:32.400 Part of the reason why I think most people are fearful of speaking out is because the largest, most obnoxious factions now are these activist groups.
00:16:41.320 And one of the purposes of our organization is to give the silent majority a voice.
00:16:46.600 We will do all the heavy lifting, but we need your help and support to be able to do that.
00:16:51.360 So I believe that the people are on our side.
00:16:54.420 And if not, I am here to make sure that they know exactly what's going on in our country.
00:16:59.500 Thank you so much for coming on the show, Dimpy.
00:17:01.280 We appreciate it.
00:17:02.500 Thank you so much.
00:17:03.540 Always a pleasure.
00:17:04.820 All right.
00:17:06.260 If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting great independent journalism where breaking news stories are told by going to JunoNews.com backslash straight up.
00:17:16.200 That's the name of this show, straight up.
00:17:18.480 JunoNews.com backslash straight up.
00:17:21.360 We really appreciate that.
00:17:23.140 Thank you so much.
00:17:23.880 We'll see you next time.