St. Patrick Co-Cathedral (Yellowknife, NT) damaged by incendiary device

Early on 01 July 2021, Yellowknife RCMP and the city fire division responded to a fire at St. Patrick Co-Cathedral, the Roman Catholic church on 52 Street in downtown Yellowknife. Officers were called to the scene at roughly 12:30 a.m. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Mackenzie-Fort Smith said an incendiary device had been placed through a broken window of the building.

The fire caused relatively limited damage. No one was injured. Bishop Jon Hansen said the church was deliberately targeted and that most of the harm came from smoke and from firefighting efforts, with damage to walls and pews but no apparent structural or roof collapse. He described the fire as intentionally set, and the territorial fire marshal's office was involved alongside the RCMP, which treated the blaze as suspicious and opened a criminal investigation.

RCMP did not at the time confirm a definitive cause or name a suspect, saying circumstances pointed to possible criminality. No arrests or arson charges in connection with this specific fire were announced in the available reporting.

The incident occurred during a wave of fires and vandalism at churches across Canada in June and July 2021, after the reported discovery of suspected unmarked graves at former Indian residential school sites, beginning near Kamloops, British Columbia. Indigenous leaders, including the Dene Nation, publicly condemned the burning of churches.

This was a domestic Canadian incident, not foreign state sabotage or organized terrorism. The use of an incendiary device through a window indicates a deliberate attack, and the bishop and fire officials called it intentional, but RCMP stopped short of formally confirming the cause and no suspect was publicly identified in the available record. The timing places it within the 2021 church-fire wave tied to anger over residential schools, yet no motive was officially established for this fire. Attribution therefore remains unknown, with context strongly suggestive but not proven.