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.”
Hellbound and Down 