Ten churches in Alberta were vandalised in a single day as Canada continues to see churches, primarily Roman Catholic, burned to the ground in several provinces over the past month.

More than ten churches in the province of Alberta were vandalised on Canada’s national holiday of Canada Day, or Dominion Day, on Thursday, with most being vandalised with red paint in an apparent protest against the Roman Catholic church’s role in the Canadian residential school system.

According to a report from the BBC, at least one of the churches vandalised was an African Evangelical church that primarily catered to African refugees who had fled their home countries, often due to churches being burned down and anti-Christian persecution.

“These folks came to Canada with the hope that they could practise their faith peacefully,” Alberta conservative Premier Jason Kenney said {snip}

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The vandalism attacks come after a wave of churches, some a century or more old, being burned to the ground in suspicious fires in several Canadian provinces. {snip}

Premier Kenney later attended the scene of the suspected arson and stated that it “appears to have been a criminal act of hate-inspired violence.”

On June 14th, the 204-year-old St. John’s Anglican Church caught fire on the Six Nations First Nations reserve in Ontario, with a local linking the inferno to protests over the graves discovered in Kamloops.

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Some news outlets have erroneously described the unmarked graves as “mass graves”, although the BBC conceded that, in fact, at least some “Burial plots used to be marked with wooden crosses that crumbled over the years”.