People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier arrested by RCMP in Manitoba
Social Sharing
Bernier attended rally against COVID-19 restrictions held in southern Manitoba village
[Pyongyang on the Prairies. Human rights — freedom of speech, freedom of assembly — brutalized and trampled. A former Member of Parliament arrested and handcuffed for attending a non-violent rally. Hope Pol Pot Pallister is proud. — Paul Fromm]
Caitlyn Gowriluk · CBC News · Posted: Jun 11, 2021 2:49 PM CT | Last Updated: 24 minutes ago
Maxime Bernier was taken into custody by Manitoba RCMP after attending a rally protesting COVID-19 restrictions on Friday in St-Pierre-Jolys, Man. (Laïssa Pamou/SRC)
People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier was arrested after appearing at a sparsely attended rally against COVID-19 restrictions in a southern Manitoba village on Friday afternoon.
Radio-Canada’s Laïssa Pamou who was covering the event said the rally in St-Pierre-Jolys, which is about 57 kilometres south of Winnipeg, saw no more than 15 people in attendance. After the event ended, Bernier got into a vehicle to head to a rally in nearby St. Malo, another small, rural community.
That’s when he was pulled out of the vehicle by Mounties who handcuffed him and put him in the back seat of an RCMP vehicle.
Bernier spoke to Radio-Canada shortly before he was detained and said he got a ticket for violating public health orders at a rally in the nearby town of Niverville earlier Friday. He did not say how much he was fined — just that he planned to fight it.
An RCMP spokesperson confirmed Bernier was ticketed earlier in the day.
“It is the duty of the RCMP to enforce the laws of Manitoba, and those include public health orders. Mr. Bernier knew of the health orders and has already received a ticket. The continuation of the offence of violating the current public health orders in Manitoba has resulted in his arrest,” Tara Seel said in an email.
WATCH | Bernier arrested in Manitoba:
People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier taken into custody by RCMP in Manitoba
8 hours ago0:25People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier was handcuffed and put in the back of an RCMP vehicle after attending a rally against COVID-19 restrictions in St-Pierre-Jolys, Man., on Friday afternoon. 0:25
Bernier was charged under the Public Health Act for assembling in a gathering at an outdoor public place and for failing to self-isolate once he got to Manitoba, and he will appear before a magistrate, Seel said.
Manitoba Justice said it would not comment on how long Bernier might be held and also would not say when he might appear before the magistrate, as his case is now before the courts.
The penalties section of Manitoba’s Public Health Act states the maximum sanction is a $100,000 fine, one year in jail or both.
Bernier had announced a tour of southern Manitoba this weekend that was set to include several stops at anti-lockdown rallies in spite of pandemic restrictions banning large events and requiring people to self-isolate when entering the province if they’re not fully vaccinated.
Bernier’s appearances in Niverville and St-Pierre-Jolys were the first two rallies listed on an itinerary posted on Facebook that was supposed to see him stop in the rural cities of Morden and Winkler later Friday.
He was also scheduled to appear in the communities of La Salle and Lorette, as well as in Winnipeg on Saturday, then in the cities of Steinbach and Selkirk on Sunday, according to the itinerary.
Rights violated, party claims
People’s Party of Canada spokesperson Martin Masse said in a statement Bernier was “wrongfully arrested” on charges that violate his charter rights.
“This isn’t about COVID anymore. It’s political repression. This is the kind of stuff countries like China and Russia do,” Masse said.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms said in a news release that it will appear in court on Bernier’s behalf.
The Calgary-based organization has also been involved in challenges of lockdown measures across the country, including one in Manitoba that saw seven churches take the province to court over its pandemic powers. No decision has been issued yet in that challenge.
A provincial spokesperson previously told CBC News that the province was aware of Bernier’s planned rallies and would be conducting surveillance to gather video and other evidence.
At a news conference on Thursday morning, Premier Brian Pallister said Bernier would be “light in the pocket book” if he planned on violating Manitoba’s public health orders.
Stand Up to the Mob– The Statue Wreckers & Their Establishment Enablers!
When a mob vandalizes or tears down statues that have been in place for generations of nation-builders, whether statesmen like Sir John A. Macdonald, Father of Confederation and first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada, or educators like Egerton Ryerson, one of the chief architects of the Upper Canadian – Ontarian for the hopelessly up-to-date – public school system, back the in days when schools were a credit to their builders rather than a disgrace, this tells us much more about the mob than about the historical figures whose memory they are attacking. It is far easier to tear something down than it is to build something, especially something of lasting benefit. It is also much quicker. What these acts tell us is that the members of these mobs, whether taken individually or collectively, who are howling for the “cancelling” of the memories of men like Macdonald and Ryerson, do not have it in them to achieve a thousandth of what such men accomplished. Driving them down this quick and easy, but ultimately treacherous and deadly, path of desecration and destruction, is the spirit of Envy, which is not mere jealousy, the wish to have what others have, but the hatred of others for being, having, or doing what you do not and cannot be, have, or do yourself. It was traditionally considered among the very worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, second only to Pride. This makes it almost fitting, in a perverse sort of way, that last weekend’s mob assault on the statue of Ryerson at the University that bears his name, took place at the beginning of the month which, to please the alphabet soup people of all the colours of the rainbow, now bears the name of that Sin in addition to the Roman name for the queen of Olympus.
The toppling of the Ryerson statue came at the end of a week in which the Canadian media, evidently tired of the bat flu after a year and a half, found a new dead horse to flog. Late in May, a couple of days after the anniversary of the incident which, after it was distorted and blown out of proportion by the media, sparked last year’s wave of race riots and “Year Zero” Cultural Maoism, and just in time to launch Indigenous History Month, yet another new handle for the month formerly known as June, the Kamloops Indian Band made an announcement. They had hired someone to use some fancy newfangled sonar gizmo to search the grounds of the old Indian Residential School at Kamloops and, lo and behold, they had discovered 215 unmarked graves.
The Canadian mainstream media was quick to label this discovery “shocking”. This speaks extremely poorly about the present state of journalistic integrity in this country. When used as an adjective, the word shocking expresses a negative judgement about that which is so described but it also generally conveys a sense of surprise on the part of the person doing the judging. There was nothing in the Kamloops announcement, however, that ought to have been surprising. It revealed nothing new about the Indian Residential Schools. That there are unmarked graves on the grounds of these schools has been known all along. The fourth volume of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report is entitled Missing Children and Unmarked Burials. It is 273 pages long and was published in December of 2015. According to this volume the death rate due to such factors as disease – tuberculosis was the big one – and suicide was much higher among aboriginal children at the Residential Schools than among school children in the general population. The TRC attributed this to the inadequacy of government standards and regulations for these schools which fell under the jurisdiction of the federal government rather than the provincial education ministries like other schools, as well as inadequate enforcement of such standards and regulations, and inadequate funding. Had the TRC been the impartial body of inquiry it made itself out to be it would also have compared the death rate among Residential School children to that among aboriginal children who remained at home on the reserves. At any rate, according to the TRC Report, unless the families lived nearby or could afford to have the bodies sent to them, they were generally buried in cemeteries at the schools which were abandoned and fell into disuse and decay after the schools were closed. All that this “new discovery” has added to what is already contained in that volume is the location of 215 of these graves. One could be forgiven for thinking that all the progressives in the mainstream Canadian media who have been spinning the Residential School narrative into a wrecking ball to use against Canada and the men who built her are not actually that familiar with the contents of the TRC Report.
The Canada-bashing progressives have been reading all sorts of ridiculous conclusions into the discovery of these graves that the actual evidence in no way bears out. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was hardly an impartial and unbiased body of inquiry. Its end did not seem to be the first noun in its title so much as painting as unflattering a portrait of the Indian Residential Schools, the Canadian churches, and the Canadian government as was possible. Even still, it did not go so far as to accuse the schools of the mass murder of children. The most brazen of the progressive commentators have now been pointing to the discovery of the graves and making that accusation, and their slightly less brazen colleagues have been reporting the story in such a way as to lead their audiences to that conclusion without their outright saying it. This is irresponsible gutter journalism at its worst. The Kamloops band and its sonar technicians have not discovered anything that the TRC Report had not already told us was there, and bodies have not been exhumed, let alone examined for cause of death. Indeed, they did not even discover a “mass grave” as innumerable media commentators have falsely stated, with some continuing to falsely say this despite the band chief having issued an update in which she explicitly stated “This is not a mass grave”. The significance of this is that it shows that the media has been painting the picture of a far more calloused disposal of bodies than the evidence supports or the band claims.
The media, of course, are not acting in bona fide. This time last year, they were using the death of George Floyd to promote a movement that was inciting race riots all across the United States and even throughout the larger Western world. Coinciding with this was a wave of mob attacks on the monuments of a wide assortment of Western nation-builders, institutional founders, statesmen, and other honoured historical figures. The New York Times, the American trash rag of record, had been laying the foundation for this for months by running Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, a revisionist distortion of American history that interprets everything by viewing it through the lens of slavery, in its Sunday Magazine supplement. What we are seeing up here this year is simply the Canadian left-wing gutter press trying to reproduce its American cousin’s success of last year.
Those who use their influence to support statue-toppling mobs have no business commenting on history whatsoever. By their very actions they demonstrate that they have not learned a fairly basic historical lesson. Movements that seek to tear down a country’s history – her past cannot be torn down, but her history, her “remembered past” to use John Lukacs’ definition, can – never end well but rather in disaster, destruction, and misery for all. The Jacobins attempted this in France in the 1790s when they started history over with their Republic at “Year One”, and endued up with the Reign of Terror. It has been a pretty standard feature of all Communist revolutions since. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, when they took over Cambodia in 1975, declared it to be “Year Zero”. Watch the film “The Killing Fields” or read my friend Reaksa Himm’s memoir The Tears of My Soul to find out what that was like. Anybody who fails to grasp the simple historical fact that these are terrible examples and not ones to be emulated has no business passing judgement on the errors of the historical figures who built countries and institutions, led them through difficult periods, and otherwise did the long and difficult work of construction, enriching future generations, rather than the short and easy work of destruction that can only impoverish them.
There are undoubtedly those who would feel that this comparison of today’s statue-topplers who are now likening our country’s founders to Hitler with the Jacobins, Maoists, Pol Pot and other statue-toppling, country-and-civilization destroyers of the past is unfair. It is entirely appropriate, however. It is one thing to acknowledge that bad things took place at the Indian Residential Schools and to give those who suffered those things a platform and the opportunity to share their story. It is another thing altogether to use those bad things to paint a cartoonish caricature so as to condemn the schools, the churches that administered them, and the country herself, wholesale, and to silence those whose testimony as to their experiences runs contrary to this one-sided, un-nuanced, narrative. It is one thing to acknowledge that admired leaders of the past were human beings and thus full of flaws, or even to point out examples of how they fell short of the standards of their own day or of timeless standards. It is something quite different to use their flaws to discredit and dismiss their tremendous accomplishments and, even worse, to condemn them for failing to hold attitudes that are now all but ubiquitous but which nobody anywhere in the world held until the present generation.
When the so-called Truth and Reconciliation process began – I don’t mean the appointment of the Commission but the proceedings that led to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement which brought about the creation of the Commission, so we are talking about two and a half decades ago – the discussion was primarily about physical and sexual abuse that some of the alumni of the schools had suffered there, over which they had initiated the lawsuits that led to the Settlement. With the creation of the TRC, however, the discussion came to be dominated by people with another very different agenda. Their agenda was to condemn the entire Residential Schools system as a project of “cultural genocide”.
The concept of “cultural genocide” is nonsensical. Genocide, a term coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, means the murder of a “people”, in the sense of a group with a common ancestry and identity. The Holocaust of World War II is the best known example. The mass murder of Tutsis in Rwanda towards the end of that country’s civil war in 1994 is a more recent example. The concept of “cultural genocide” was thought up by the same man who coined the term. It refers to efforts to destroy a people’s cultural identity without killing the actual people. Since the equation of something that does not involve killing actual people with mass murder ought to be morally repugnant to any thinking person, the concept should have been condemned and rejected from the moment Lemkin first conceived it. Soon after it was conceived, however, the leaders of certain Jewish groups began using it as a club against Christianity. Christianity teaches that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Messiah, the Redeemer prophesied in the Old Testament Who established the promised New Covenant through His death and Resurrection and Who is the only way to God for Jews and Gentiles alike. Christianity’s primary mission from Jesus Christ is evangelism – telling the world the Gospel, the Good News about Who Jesus is and what He has done. While not everybody believes the Gospel when they hear it and it is not our mission to compel anybody to believe, obviously the desired end of evangelism is for everybody to believe. Since rabbinic Judaism has long taught that a Jew who converts to Christianity ceases to be a Jew, the Jewish leaders in question argued that evangelism amounts to cultural genocide – if all the Jews believed the Gospel, there would be no Jews any more. On the basis of this kind of reasoning they began pressuring Christian Churches to change their doctrines and liturgical practices as they pertain to the evangelism of Jews. Sadly, far too many Church leaders proved to be weak in the face of this kind of pressure.
Canada’s Laurentian political class showed a similar lack of backbone when it came to defending our country against the smear that the Residential Schools were designed to wipe out Native Indian cultural identities. Indeed, their attitude throughout the entire “Truth and Reconciliation” process was to accept the blame for whatever accusations were thrown against Canada and to refuse to hold the accusers accountable to even the most basic standards of courtroom justice. Imagine a trial where the judge allows only the prosecutor to call witnesses, denies the defense the right to cross examine, and refuses to allow the defense to make a case. That will give you a picture of what the trial of Canada by the TRC over the Residential Schools was like.
The reality is that had Canada wanted to erase Native Indian cultural identity she would have abolished the reserves, torn up the treaties and declared the Indians to be ordinary citizens like everyone else, insisted that they all live among other Canadians, and that their children go to the same public schools as everybody else. In other words, she would have done the exact opposite of what she actually did. The Canadian government’s policy was clearly to preserve Indian cultural identity, not to eradicate it. Had they wanted to do the latter, residential schools would have been particularly ill-suited to the task. The TRC maintains that the idea was to break Indian cultural identity by taking children away from the cultural influence of their parents. If this was the case one would think the government would have had all Indian children sent to these schools. In actuality, however, in the approximately a century and a half that these schools operated, only a minority of Indian children were sent there. This was a very small minority in the early days of the Dominion when Sir John A. Macdonald, whom the TRC et al seem more interested in vilifying than anyone else, was Prime Minister. The government also ran day schools on the reserves and in those days the government only forced children to go to the residential schools when their parents persistently neglected to send them to the day schools. The Dominion had made it mandatory for all Indian children within a certain age range to attend school – just as the provinces had made it mandatory for all other children within the same age range to attend school. It was much later in Canadian history, after the government decided to make the schools serve the second function of being foster group homes for children removed from unsafe homes by social workers that a majority of Indian children were sent to the residential schools. Even then, the eradication of Indian cultural identity is hardly a reasonable interpretation of the government’s intent.
The TRC, in the absence of serious challenge from either Canada’s political class or the fourth estate, created a narrative indicting our country and its founders for “cultural genocide”, featuring a one-sided caricature of the Indian Residential Schools. Now, after a discovery that adds nothing that was not already contained in the TRC Report, left-wing radicals egged on by the mendacious and meretricious media, have gone far beyond the TRC in their defamatory accusations of murder against the schools and their Pol Potish demands that we “cancel” our country, her history, and her historical figures. It is about time that we stood up to these thugs who in their envy and hatred of those who did what they themselves could never do by building our country wish to tear it all down. It is slightly encouraging that the Conservatives were able to stop the motion by Jimmy Dhaliwal’s Canada-hating socialist party to have Parliament declare the Residential Schools to have been a genocide. I didn’t think they had the kives – the Finnish word for “stones” the bearing of which as a last name by a local reporter brings to mind how the biggest man in Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men was called “Little John” – to do so.
END THE LOCKDOWN Rallies & Events in the Okanagan, June 12-19
We understand you may be tired of coming out to rallies but we hope you push through this false sense of summer security This is not the time to get comfortable but rather a time to push forward and CLEAR is going to participate in an innovative new idea this coming Saturday, June 12, 2021 running two Kelowna rallies at the same time!!!
CLEAR goals and objectives are to talk to as many people as we can and give out as many brochures and educational materials as possible. This dispels the media’s myths about us. It is so important to get a lot more loyal and supportive people coming out to these Saturday’s rallies. We recognize there are many people in Kelowna who support all of our efforts, but they know very little of our freedom fighting activities.
As such we have decided to reach out to the people in Rutland this coming Saturday at Roxby Park, on Hwy 33 across from Save-On Foods. We will have our tent and information table and also protest with signs on the highway.
So this Saturday you will have a choice whether you join us and help spread the word in Rutland, or attend our regular rally in Kelowna central at Stuart Park with The Bear. Bring your friends and people who care and lets push hard through this summer being prepared for another fall lockdown.
Kelowna Rally June 12 @ Noon in Stuart Park
Meet at 12 NOON @ The Bear. Speakers: ILona will be sharing on masks and Better Business Standards community support. Bettina will be sharing on no masks & her growing art project. We will then head down to protest on the highway. Bring your signs or use ours! CLEAR thanks you for your support and for all you do throughout the week to promote freedom!
Rutland Rally June 12 @ Noon in Roxby Park
Meet us at 10am until 2pm @ Roxby Park across from Save On Foods. Speakers: David Lindsay will be sharing on current events and then protesting on highway #33. CLEAR thanks you for coming down to support the Rutland Rally and if you have signs we encourage you to bring them.
DAVID LINDSAY WILL BE SPEAKING AT MARK FRIESEN’S EVENT IN VERNON AND KELOWNA! WHEN: VERNON on Friday, June 11th @ 3:45 pm. KELOWNA on Friday, June 11th @ 7pm. WHERE: VERNON at Polson Park KELOWNA at Kerry Park @ the sails TOPICS: Mark Friesen will be discussing UN Infiltration, UNDRIP, Paris Accord, and Gov’t abuse of power.
David Lindsay will be discussing the importance of the Coronation Oath and how it relates to COVID-19
DAVID’S CORNER Even though Bonnie the Commie has promised to install a graduated recognition of our rights and freedoms over the next few months, we all know that she has broken these promises now for over a year. She cannot “give them back to us” as they were never hers to steal in the first place.
There is also a high probability that she will once again begin to try more restrictions in the fall – claiming that there will be a fourth wave at that time. We need only look to other provinces and how they continue to unconstitutionally restrict their people. The price of freedom truly is eternal vigilance, knowing that the ongoing culture change, acceptance of masks and vaccines, needs our continued and ongoing opposition.
If we truly “stand on guard for thee”…then we need to ask people to do so also!
UP COMING RALLIES
VERNON – Saturday June 12th, 12 Noon @ Polson Park. PENTICTON – Sunday June 13th, 12 Noon @ Main & Warren. KAMLOOPS – Saturday June 12th, 12 Noon @ Riverside Park. CLEAR KELOWNA MEGA RALLY @ Noon Saturday June 19, 2021 with speakers: Tanya Gaw with Action4Canada Ted Kuntz with Vaccine Choice Canada Danielle Pistilli with Freedom Organization Children Speakers Analeigh & Ashleigh Then Downtown Kelowna March
Decision in YOUR WARD NEWS “Hate” Appeal Due June 14, 2021
REMINDER: Your Ward News appeal decision 9:30 AM on June 14th . This is the appeal against the 2019 conviction of Dr. James Sears, editor, and Leroy St. Germaine, publisher of YOUR WARD NEWS, for wilfully “promoting hate” against two privileged groups — Jews and women.
Statue of Egerton Ryerson toppled at university after rally honouring residential school victims
By Rosa SabaBusiness ReporterSun., June 6, 2021timer4 min. readupdateArticle was updated 1 hr ago
A statue of Egerton Ryerson at the university named for him was toppled on Sunday after a demonstration in honour of the 215 children whose remains were discovered at a former residential school site in Kamloops, B.C.
The statue, on Gould Street at the heart of the downtown Toronto campus, was doused with paint and smashed during the gathering that began earlier in the day at Queen’s Park.
As the bell tolled 8 p.m. from the Kerr Hall clock tower, people surrounded the fallen statue and later climbed atop the now-empty base, both of which were covered in graffiti referencing the 215 lost children and the role of government and churches in residential school atrocities.
Supporters at the site said they were relieved to see the statue, a point of contention for years, come down.
Kayla Sutherland, who stood atop the plinth and said a prayer, said she saw the removal of the statue not as an act of aggression but as a ceremony, adding that it would be a positive memory for her.
Sutherland said her grandmother went to a residential school, and she has never been able to access records about the school or what happened there.
She said the march from Queen’s Park to the statue had a strong message: “Canada is guilty of genocide.”
Indigenous people who were sent to residential schools and their families continue to bear the scars of that experience, she said.
As the evening wore on, onlookers came and went while demonstrators milled around the fallen monument.
People took turns hitting the head of the statue while others drummed and lit bundles of sage as the light began to fade. It was a celebratory but at times chaotic scene, with shouts as police briefly talked to the demonstrators, and chants of “No peace on stolen land” as trucks arrived just after 9 p.m.
When the pickup trucks pulled up and men in orange vests got out, demonstrators surrounded the statue, saying it could not be removed.
Minutes later the trucks drove away and the crowd cheered.
Jamie Drakes-Lindsey, who goes by the name Monikwa, said they weren’t present when the statue came down, but they were moved by the sight of it on the ground.
“I came, I parked my bike, I cried. I literally dropped to my knees,” said Drakes-Lindsey.
“This is very emotional, a very proud thing for us. This is definitely a win.”
Drakes-Lindsey had been camping out at the statue for the last four days, they said, protecting the shrine of children’s shoes at the base representing the 215 children whose remains were discovered in unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School last month.
Drakes-Lindsey said there was a police presence all day during the demonstration at Queen’s Park and at the statue.
Some demonstrators said a “wind” or “tornado” took down the statue, indicating they would not share more details about how it was dislodged.
Don’t miss the latest from the Star
Stay up to date on the news you need to know with our email newsletters and alerts, including up-to-the-minute updates on Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
Gary Wassaykeesic said the statue “feels good coming down.”
“But we have to go further than this statue,” he said.
Sutherland agreed.
“What policies are actually being changed?” she asked. “What are those systematic changes that need to happen within all levels of government?”
Sutherland said she wants to hear a proper apology from the Catholic Church, which operated the residential school where her grandmother was sent.
The statue and the name of the university itself have become flashpoints because of the role of Egerton Ryerson, a 19th-century educator, in shaping Canada’s residential schools system. The system, which lasted for more than a century until the last school closed in 1996, saw tens of thousands of First Nations, Métis and Inuit children forcibly removed from their families and made to attend the church-run, government-sponsored schools. Thousands of children died at the schools, where physical and sexual abuse was rampant.
Wassaykeesic said what happened in downtown Toronto on Sunday represented “the power of the child,” referring to the discovery of the 215 children’s remains in Kamloops.
Last week, a group of faculty called for Ryerson’s name and statue to be removed from the institution.
“We, Indigenous faculty at Ryerson, sign our names to this letter, with the hope we are finally heard, both by the university community, who we ask to join this campaign, and by the university administration, who we ask to recognize that the time to remove the statue and rename our school is now,” they wrote.
Last month, a separate letter from the Yellowhead Institute, a First Nation-led research centre at the university, said its students and faculty would be removing “Ryerson” from their email signatures and other documents, instead calling the school “X University.”
Drakes-Lindsey said they believe this is just the beginning.
“When I used to be homeless … I used to sleep here,” they said outside the university. “It would taunt me. It would look down on me, that statue.”
Last week, a painting and bust of Egerton Ryerson were removed from the Ontario legislature after a request from the leader of the Opposition NDP.
Charges Withdrawn Against Mask Dissident John McCash
BRAMPTON, June 3, 2021. Today, in a brief court appearance, Mississauga dissident John McCash, 48, learned that the Crown had withdrawn a charge of causing a disturbance that goes back to an incident at a Chinese grocery store last July 5.
Mr. McCash was denied entry to T & T Grocery store because he was not wearing a mask. He was caught on a cellphone camera arguing with a bossy boots employee and saying: “If I wear a mask I will have an asthma attack and these communists are attacking all of us…go back to China and take your coronavirus with you.”
He was instantly denounced in the woke press for “racism”. Police duly charged him, on July 16, with “causing a disturbance.” The charges were always political. Had he been shouting “Black lives matter” or “defund the police,” there’d have been no charges.
“Hate-crime incidents have a negative impact on our community and create a ripple effect. It can increase feelings of vulnerability, anxiety and fear, not only on the individual who has directly been victimized, but also to the community at large. Reporting incident of hate-crime is essential to stopping these incidents; we are dedicated to ensuring the safety and well-being of all we serve,” said Chief Nishan Duraiappah.
“This was political persecution from the beginning,” says Paul Fromm, Director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression. “Mr. McCash was expressing a political and medical opinion. There was no ‘hate’ there
CAFE backed Mr. McCash and staged a protest, September 25, outside the Brampton Courthouse at his first appearance (although it was by video.)
“While we are happy that the Crown recognized its nothing burger of a case and withdrew the charge,” says Paul Fromm, “the initial charge was political persecution. Mr. McCash had to hire a lawyer and is out of pocket. This is an abuse BY process.”
Mr. McCash is a regular at the weekly Saturday END THE LOCKDOWN rallies at Queen’s Park in Toronto. He and a group of like minded Christians meet on the steps of nearby St. Basil’s church for some short prayers. Because of Medico-Stalinist rules, the church is not actually open.
He and his group, complete with a large cross and posters the Blessed Mother talk to the public at Queen’s Park. In a loud voice he greets passersby with “We follow the Lord, not Ford”; that is Doug Ford, Premier Lockdown.
John McCashPart of CAFE Protest in Support of John McCash, September 25
Christians Defending Bat Flu Tyranny and Oppression are Deluded and Deceived
The last Anglican priests that I spoke to in person were those of my own parish in March of last year, the day before the bishop’s order shutting down the diocese went into effect. Since then, I have spoken to one of the priests by phone once, and communicated with the others through e-mail. Oh, I could have seen them in person again, had I started attending services when the parish partially re-opened last summer. That would have meant a compromise of conviction however. I will not darken my parish door again as long as I am told to register in advance to do so, to impede my breathing in that hot, stuffy, building for the hour and a half that I am there by covering my nose and mouth with a stupid diaper that has reminded me of nothing so much as a the Mark of the Beast since it was first introduced, and to “socially distance” while there. As far as I am concerned telling people to pre-register to book a place in Church because only a limited few will be admitted constitutes turning people away from the Ministry of Jesus Christ in Word and Sacrament and is an act of blasphemy crying out to heaven for vengeance. To be fair to my parish – and the entire Anglican Church of Canada – I did not include the practice of Communion in one kind in the above list of deal-breakers, since I think they are using pre-intinction as a means of distributing the Sacrament in both kinds and thus are not in technical violation of the Thirtieth Article of Religion (and the basic principles of the English Reformation). I watch their services on Youtube but I refuse to regard this as “participating in an online service” or anything more than watching a broadcast of somebody else performing a service. This is because I have taken to heart Aleksandr Soltzhenitsyn’s instructions on the day of his arrest in 1974 to those oppressed by Communist tyranny. Those instructions were to “live not by lies”. When the government refuses to respect the constitution’s limits on its powers and claims for itself the right to completely suspend our basic freedoms of assembly, association, religion, and, increasingly, speech, in its self-delusion that a respiratory virus can be stopped by government action, subjects the entire population to the absolute rule of medical technocrats, and goes out of its way to demonstrate its contempt for religion, classifying Churches and synagogues and mosques as “non-essential” while liquor and cannabis stores and abortion clinics are classified as “essential”, it comes disgustingly close to the Soviet-style Communist tyranny that Soltzhenitsyn suffered under and about which he warned the West. While it is true that rights and freedoms are not absolute, as our governments have been saying in response to challenges to their actions, this is not at all at issue. It deflects from the fact that they have been acting like their authority to limit our rights and freedoms is absolute – this is what “nothing is off the table” means – and this is the essence of totalitarian tyranny.
My purpose here is not to knock the clergy of my parish. I have explained why I haven’t seen any of them in person since last March to lead in to the fact that apart from them, the last Anglican clergyman that I had spoken to in person, earlier the same month, was the Right Reverend Donald Phillips. Donald Phillips was consecrated Bishop of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land in 2000, the year after I had left what is now Providence University College in Otterburne and moved to Winnipeg. He served the diocese in this capacity until his retirement upon the consecration of his successor, the current incumbent, the Right Reverend Geoffrey Woodcroft, in November 2018. When I was confirmed in the Anglican Church as an adult, he was the bishop to do it.
It was at the Centennial Concert Hall that I ran into him and his wife Nancy about a week or so prior to the lockdown. 2020 was the 250th year since the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven. As part of its celebration of this anniversary, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra performed all five of his Piano Concertos and his Choral Fantasy over the course of the two evenings of the 6th and 7th of March. The performances, conducted by WSO Music Director Daniel Raiskin, featured Russian pianist Alexei Volodin. The vocals were provided by the University of Manitoba Singers and the Canadian Mennonite University Chorus. The 2019/2020 season was the first time in several years where I had opted to buy tickets for only a handful of concerts rather than the “Ultimate Classics” package that comes with one performance each for all the shows in both of the Masterworks series. I lost my usual seat doing it this way, but was able to take in both of evenings of “Back to Beethoven” as the Piano Concerto marathon was called. These were the last WSO performances that I attended. They are likely to be the last WSO performances that I shall ever hear because the lake of fire will freeze into a solid block of ice before I ever pay concert admission to watch a livestreamed performance and am certainly not going to be bullied into taking an experimental new kind of vaccine that took less than a year to develop about which the long term side effects cannot possibly be known just to regain as “privileges” the rights that were stolen from me by power-mad paranoid hypochondriacs shortly after the concerts I have just described.
I have seldom attended a symphony, opera, or anything else at the Centennial Concert Hall without encountering at least one, and usually several, people whom I know, and this was no exception. Indeed, I was seated right next to one old acquaintance for the Friday evening performance. It was also in the Friday evening performance – some people went to both concerts, others showed up only for the one or the other – that I ran into Don and Nancy. They were seated in the row behind me, a few seats down – very close to where my subscription seat had been, actually. I chatted with them briefly in the intermission and after the concert. Did any of us suspect at the time that shortly thereafter the diocese would be essentially closed and everyone forced into social isolation for over a year by public health orders?
Towards the end of his article, he raised the following hypothetical objections to his article:
Some might call into question the whole nature of what I am saying. Should a Christian publicly challenge the actions of other Christians? Is that not being judgmental?
His answer was “Not when the integrity of the proclamation of the Gospel is at stake”.
Very well then. Since nothing in recent memory has threatened the integrity of the proclamation of the Gospel more than the quisling behaviour of the Church leaders who collaborated with totalitarianism in the Third Reich and behind the Iron Curtain, I claim our retired bishop’s justification for his remarks as my own for my rebuttal.
He begins by saying that one of the pastors with whom he disagrees – he does not mention any names but it was Tobias Tissen of the Church of God Restoration, just outside Steinbach – had been quoted as having said “We have no authority, scripturally-based and based on Christian convictions, to limit anyone from coming to hear the word of God. We have no authority to tell people you can’t come to church. That’s in God’s jurisdiction.”
Retired Bishop Don answers this by saying “the New Testament presents quite a different picture of the responsibility of the Church for itself”.
He proceeds to justify this statement by making reference, first to the bestowing of the “keys of the kingdom” in St. Matthew’s Gospel, and second to the Pauline epistles in which the Apostle “constantly confronts and admonishes churches to teach, direct, and sometimes even discipline their members so as not to hinder or distort the mission of the Gospel in the world and Christ’s command to his Church”.
This is an interestingly novel way of interpreting these passages. Yes, the “keys of the kingdom”, regardless of whether they are understood as having been given to St. Peter and his successors alone, all of the Apostles and their successors collectively, or the entire assembly of Christian disciples (the Church) collectively, have traditionally been understood to include the authority to exclude from the fellowship of the Church. In most Christian communions the technical term for the exercise of this authority is excommunication. Some more radical sects use the word “shunning” with the same basic meaning but often with additional connotations of a more complete social ostracism. This is not where the novelty lies. What is novel in this interpretation is the suggestion that this authority can be legitimately exercised other than as corrective discipline in cases where someone refuses to repent of open sin or is found to be teaching serious doctrinal error. Had our retired bishop not intended to suggest this it would have made no sense to bring the keys up in this context. It is rather surprising, therefore, that he tries to bolster the suggestion with an appeal to St. Paul. In his first epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul instructs them to excommunicate a man who has been committing “such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles”, meaning a type that was condemned and considered extremely shameful by the rather tolerant pagan culture of the time, an assessment to which all the extent classical literature pertaining to the myth of Oedipus indeed, bears testimony. In his second epistle to the Corinthians, however, he told them that the punishment had been sufficient and to forgive and comfort the man, who presumably had since repented. The picture this paints of excommunicative authority is of a means of corrective discipline, to be applied as a last resort in extreme circumstances, and lifted as soon as repentance makes possible. This hardly supports the idea that the keys can or should be used to bar people from the Ministries of Word and Sacrament, not as an act of corrective discipline, but as an instrument of public health policy.
Novelty is not a quality that is valued very highly when it comes to the interpretation of Scripture and doctrine in the Anglican tradition which has long appealed to the Vincentian canon as the gold standard litmus test of catholicity and orthodoxy. In addition to the novelty of the Right Reverend Phillips’ interpretation of the keys, however, there is another problem in its conflict with Scriptural teaching on a multitude of other issues.
One example of this is the Scriptures’ teachings with regards to civil obedience. If the pastors protesting the bat flu restrictions are at fault their error is in practicing Thoreau/Gandhi/King style civil disobedience, for which there is no Scriptural justification. Civil obedience is commanded of Christians by St. Paul in the thirteenth chapter of his epistle to the Romans. There are, however, clear exceptions. The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament illustrates these. If the civil authorities require the worship of a false god, believers in the True and Living God are not to obey, as the example of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who refused to bow to the golden image of Nebuchadnezzar and were thrown into the fiery furnace demonstrates. If the civil authorities forbid the worship of the True God, believers are not to obey, as the example of Daniel himself in the incident that led to his being cast to the lions shows. While the latter is the most obviously relevant of the two, I would argue that the first also applies here, in that the kind of trust and obedience the public health orders have been asking of us is the kind that properly belongs to God alone, making an idol out of medical science (George Bernard Shaw said, almost a hundred years ago, that we have not lost faith, we have merely transferred it from God to the General Medical Council, and never has the truth of this been more apparent than at present). The Lord Himself summed it all up in the twelfth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel when He said “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”. While a general civil obedience is rendering unto Caesar (the civil authority) that which is Caesar’s, obeying when they forbid the worship of the True God or require the worship of a false one, is to render unto Caesar that which is God’s, and that is forbidden of Christians by the Highest Authority.
Another example is the Scriptures’ teachings with regards to sickness. In the Old Testament, the Israelites were told to separate those with leprosy, a far worse disease than the one that is frightening so many today, from the general community, to which they would not be readmitted until such a time as a priest had examined them and found them to have recovered. There is not a hint anywhere in the Old Testament, that banning all healthy Israelites from the Tabernacle or Temple, let alone confining them to their own dwellings and forbidding them any social interaction with their extended kin, friends, and neighbours, would be an appropriate or acceptable manner of preventing the spread of contagious disease. This is not surprising as it is an experimental new form of hyper-quarantine, first implemented in totalitarian countries like Red China, which the epidemiologists of what used to be the free world initially, although sadly mistakenly, thought they would never be able to get away with here. The Old Testament isolation requirements for lepers, of course, had the effect of heaping further suffering upon those already inflicted. Thus, when Jesus Christ arrived to fulfil the Messianic promise of a New and better Covenant, one of the most prominent signs announcing His identity as the Promised Redeemer was that He allowed the lepers to come near Him and healed them, even, in one notable instance, using tactile contact as the means of healing. He healed all who came to Him with any affliction and instructed His Apostles to do the same. The book of Acts records them doing precisely this. The Jacobean instructions in what is widely believed to be the first book of the New Testament to have been written are “Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.” Rather a far cry from “Is there a nasty cough going around? Let everyone stay away from the church, lock themselves in their houses, and never see anyone else without wearing a mask”.
Given what we have seen in the previous paragraph, is it surprising that in the two millennia of Christian history, which have seen plagues far worse than the bat flu ravage Christian countries and at times all of Christendom, never did the leaders of the Church see their duty, mission, and call in terms of shutting all the local churches down and denying the faithful access to the Word and Sacrament. Rather they saw it as their duty to keep the churches open, so that in times of great physical peril – much greater than today – access to the source of spiritual health, more important than physical health, was not cut off and hope, therefore, was kept alive, as well as to minister to the physical needs of the sick and dying, even at the risk of their own health and lives. When cholera hit Canada in 1832 and 1834, for example, John Strachan, who would become the first Bishop of Toronto in 1839 but was at the time the rector of the parish of St. James, refused to flee the city but remained to fulfil his priestly duties, visit the hospitals, minister to the sick and dying, and bury the dead.
Previous generations of Church leaders did not see keeping the churches open in times of far worse plagues than this comparatively moderate one as hindering or distorting “the mission of the Gospel in the world, and Christ’s command to the church.”
Our former diocesan chief shepherd asks the question “And what is that Gospel?” to which he provides an answer “It is the supreme command of Jesus Christ ‘to love one another as I (Jesus) have loved you’”.
This is a very enlightening answer. Not enlightening in terms of the question asked. In that regards it is just plain wrong. It is enlightening in that it reveals much about the source of confusion here.
The Gospel is not the command to love one another. The Gospel is not a commandment of any sort. It is a message. As its very name tells us, whether euangelion in Greek, or Gospel – contracted from the Old English “godspel” (“god” = “good” + “spel = “news”) it is Good News. It is spoken in the indicative mood, not the imperative. In the ministry of John the Baptist and in Jesus’ own early preaching ministry, when the Gospel was preached only to national Israel and the events around which the Gospel narratives of SS Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are centred had not yet taken place, that Good News was that the “Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”, i.e., the Messianic promises are being fulfilled before your very eyes. After the Great Commission to take the Gospel to all the nations of the world, the Ascension, the descent of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost to empower the Church, and the preaching of the Gospel to the Gentiles, the Gospel in its mature and universal form was concisely stated by St. Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians. It is that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and was seen by witnesses.
That this, and not the New Commandment, is the Gospel cannot be stressed enough. The New Commandment is not “News” of any sort, Good or otherwise. That we are commanded to love one another was hardly something unheard of prior to the Incarnation. When Jesus said the Greatest Commandment was to love God and the second was to “love thy neighbour as thyself” He was quoting commandments already familiar from the Old Testament. Nor was His statement that the whole of the Law was summed up in these a new revelation. Indeed, while most often the Gospels place the two greatest commandments in His own mouth, in one notable instance He turned the question back on a lawyer who had been interrogating Him and got the answer He wanted (Luke 10:25-28) demonstrating that the idea was nor original with Him. The similar “Golden Rule”, which appears in His Sermon on the Mount, is common to the ethical systems of almost all religions, and was notably stated, albeit in its negative “do not” form rather than the positive form Jesus used, by Rabbi Hillel, who died when Jesus was about twelve or thirteen (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat a, passage 6), and who said of it “that is the entire Torah, and the rest is interpretation”. There is a kind of theology that sees in the command to love one another the essence of the Christian kerygma and treats everything asserted about Jesus Christ in the ancient Creeds as accidental trappings that can be discarded. This theology, and note that I am not suggesting that the Right Reverend Phillips holds this theology, merely that his unfortunate wording here expresses a thought that belongs to this theology rather than orthodox Christianity, is nonsense. If that were true there would have been no need for Christianity. While there is a difference between the New Commandment and all these earlier commandments to love each other, that difference depends entirely upon the facts of the Gospel as stated by St. Paul. Apart from that Gospel, the message of Christ’s death and Resurrection, the New Commandment is meaningless. It is the Gospel that tells us what “as I have loved you” means. Christ gave the New Commandment on the evening of His betrayal, to His disciples whom He had already told of His upcoming death and Resurrection, but like so many other things He said in St. John’s Gospel, it was these events themselves that made it comprehensible.
Isn’t it interesting that the example the New Commandment tells us to follow is that of One Who gave up His life for others? Isn’t it also interesting that the New Testament repeatedly describes this act as one of “redemption”. Today, the verb “redeem” and the noun “redemption” are often used in a sense that retains some of their connotations from New Testament usage but omits their original basic meaning. To redeem meant to purchase someone out of slavery and set him free. The New Testament writers use these words of the death of Christ to depict that act as one of purchasing freedom for mankind from slavery to sin. Therefore, the New Commandment tells us that we are to love one another in the same way as He Who gave up His life to restore us to freedom.
This is interesting because the Right Reverend Phillips’ interpretation of the New Commandment which he confused with the Gospel itself is that we are to love others by doing the reverse of what Christ did – giving up our freedom for them.
Now he does go on to support his argument with evidence from St. Paul:
In 1 Corinthians chapter 9, Paul outlines the many ways in which he sacrifices his own self, his rights and privileges, his freedom in Christ, in order to effectively witness to the love of Christ. “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some,” he said (1 Corinthians 9.22)
For the Christian disciple, the effective demonstration and proclamation of the love of God for all people must take precedence over any personal demand or freedom.
St. Paul wrote his epistles to the Corinthian Church at a time when some had cast aspersions on his authority as an Apostle. A principle theme of both letters was to answer his detractors and establish confidence in this authority. This is what the Apostle is obviously concerned with through most of the ninth chapter of 1 Corinthians. In the first verse he gives his Apostolic credentials, in the second he declares that if he is not an Apostle to others he certainly is to the Corinthians for they are the seal of his Apostleship. He then goes on to talk about all the privileges and freedoms which he has as much as any of the other Apostles but which he refrains from for the sake of the work. The main point in all of this is that he, as a spiritual minister, is entitled to pecuniary support from them, but has refrained from claiming his right to the same. This is spelled out quite plainly in verses seven to fifteen
I wonder what St. Paul himself would have thought if someone from the Corinthian Church had written back to him and said that two thousand years in the future, someone would take his words about giving up the financial support to which he was entitled, so as to more effectively carry out the ministry of preaching the Gospel to which he was called and which he is bound by necessity to preach, as evidence that the entire Church should shut down, close its doors, and bar people from coming to hear said Gospel preached. I suspect he would be livid. I doubt very much that he would be any more impressed by the same application being made of his words later in the chapter, about meeting every type of person to whom he is sent in their own walk of life so as to more effectively share the Gospel with them.
His Retired Grace then refers to another quotation from a different pastor – again unnamed, but this time it was Heinrich Hildebrand of the Church of God in Aylmer, Upper Canada. Hildebrand had said “We are here to fight for God, we are here to defend the vulnerable.”
I could have told you what the bishop’s response to this would have been without having read it myself. However, here he is in his own words:
Surely the vulnerable we need to be worried about are those being exposed to the COVID-19 virus by persons not following the public health orders. Surely it is those languishing on ventilators in ICUs in hospitals across our country who are the most vulnerable!
I guess it all depends upon how we answer the question “vulnerable to what?” Even if, however, the answer is “the bat flu”, the Right Reverend Phillips’ thinking appears to be rather muddled on the subject. Those most vulnerable to the virus are not those who are exposed to it but those with complicating factors such as age, obesity, a compromised immune system, and other chronic conditions that make this virus more than just the non-lethal respiratory annoyance it is to the vast majority who contract it. When such people, the actual most vulnerable, have come into contact with the virus it has seldom been because of “persons not following the public health orders”. That is a lie, invented by arrogant politicians and public health officials such as those of our own province, in order to create a scapegoat for the failure of their own policies. The fact of the matter is that the worst and most lethal outbreaks have taken place in nursing homes where the virus spread got in and spread without any health order violations in spite of such places have been locked down quicker and stricter than anywhere else.
The bat flu, however, is not the only answer to the question “vulnerable to what?” Suppose that we supply “the public health orders themselves” as the answer to that question. We then get a very different picture of who the most vulnerable are.
Yes, public health orders hurt people. The kind of public health orders that have been enacted to slow or prevent the spread of the bat flu are especially harmful. This has been acknowledged by the World Health Organization, and even by our provincial chief public health officer. Take the mental health crisis for example. The Canadian Mental Health Association reported last December about how the “second wave of the pandemic has intensified feelings of stress and anxiety, causing alarming levels of despair, suicidal thoughts and hopelessness in the Canadian population.” It would have been more accurate for them to attribute this to the “second wave of lockdowns”. Viruses don’t have this effect. Mendacious media scaremongering might contribute to it, but overall this is exactly the sort of thing one would expect to see among people who have had all their social and community events cancelled for a year, have been forbidden any social interaction with their friends, and have been told their businesses or jobs are non-essential and must shut down. Public health orders are the primary cause of this problem. People are not meant to live this way, it goes against the social nature that God gave us, and when you force people to live in these conditions there will be disastrous consequences.
Since our bishop emeritus made use of the superlative degree of comparison in his own remarks about those vulnerable to the bat flu, I think it is fair game for me to do the same in my remarks about those vulnerable to the public health orders. Yes, some people are more vulnerable to the ill-effects of public health orders than others. Somebody who is single and lives alone will be more adversely affected by an order forbidding get-togethers with all except his own household than somebody who has a happy domestic life. Somebody who is in an abusive and unhappy relationship will be worse off because of a stay-at-home order than somebody who is happily married. Those who are independently wealthy, whose jobs can be done from home, and whose businesses are in no danger of being declared “non-essential” will not have the kind of hardships that lockdowns impose on those about whom none of these things can be said. Since the beginning of the bat flu scare the people who have been most likely to shoot their mouths off about how this never-before-tried experimental universal quarantine is “necessary” to fight a virus milder than most of those that caused pandemics in the last century, to lecture the rest of us about how unquestioning obedience to these orders is the loving thing to do and how expressing concern about economic devastation and the rapid evaporation of civil rights and liberties and their constitutional protections is somehow “selfish”, have been the people on the “least affected” side of each of these spectrums for whom the lockdowns have been mostly an inconvenience.
I will close with an observation that is related to the previous paragraph but is not specifically in response to our former bishop’s article. I note the irony that the clergymen who have been the most vocal in support of the public health orders have been the ones who preach the most about “social justice”. Indeed, I cannot think of a single dissenter from among their ranks. The dark irony of this is not just found in the fact that the public health orders, shutting down restaurant dining rooms and indoor public places like libraries and limiting homeless shelter capacities were put into effect before winter ended last year and again just before winter started having absolutely brutal consequences for the very poorest members of our society, while everyone who keeps droning on about “social justice” was glad to be ordered to stay home in their own warm bed. It can also be found in the fact that the economic result of the public health orders and the lockdown experiment has been to greatly enrich the multi-billionaires of the social media tech companies, internet delivery services, and the hopelessly corrupt pharmaceutical industry while bankrupting and driving out of business all the little guys, whose entire life’s work, and often the life’s work of their parents and grandparents before them has been wiped out through no fault of their own, but by the arrogance of some health bureaucrat who arbitrarily ruled their livelihood to be “non-essential”. This is accomplishing an economic transition to societies in which small, individually or family owned farms and businesses are unfeasible, and everyone must either sell their labour to some giant, multinational, corporation to survive, or live off of a government allowance. This is what Hilaire Belloc called “the Servile State” 109 years ago. At the time, the expression “social justice” was still in its infancy and to those who believed in it in its original sense, the Servile State depicted by Belloc was pretty much the opposite of what they called and strove for, the worst possible of worlds. Today’s “social justice” clergy have been calling for “universal basic income”, citing the pandemic and the “necessary” public health response to it as demonstrating the need for this measure, the most immediate effect of which would be to greatly accelerate the transition to the Servile State. Of course what they mean by “social justice” includes such things as Critical Race Theory, the inalienable right of biological males to participate in female sports, and every other notion of this type that left-wing academics have dreamed up and their students have uncritically accepted and regurgitated under the delusion that by doing so they are thinking for themselves, but precious little to do with anything that the expression meant a century ago. Should any of them be interested in the original version, I recommend to them the essay by that grand old Canadian economist, political scientist, wit, and Anglican layman, Stephen Leacock entitled “The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice”. I wonder what Leacock would have had to say about people who consider it to be an expression of Christian love to wish government control, greater and more intrusive than any extended or even dreamed of by the totalitarian regimes of his own day – he died in 1944 when Stalin and Hitler were both still in power – on their neighbours? Gerry T. Neal
Doug Ford is the ultra-obese (5’10”, 330 lbs.), faux-conservative governor (premier) of Ontario, which comprises half the population of Canada. His brother Rob was once the equally fat, overtly alcoholic, drug-addicted mayor of Toronto, the largest city in Canada. .
The previous premier of Ontario province was the square-jawed lesbian Kathleen Wynne. .
.
Oh, Canada….
Wiki:
Third wave
On April 9, 2021, Ford received his first dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine at a local pharmacy in Toronto, and encouraged eligible Ontarians to get inoculated.[192]
Amid growing case numbers in 2021, the government moved to introduce a third province-wide shutdown. As part of the response, Ford announced on April 16, 2021 that outdoor amenities including playgrounds would be closed, and that he would be authorizing police to require pedestrians and drivers to explain why they are not at home and provide their home address and ask why they are not at home.[193] The regulations raised concerns about a re-legalization of carding.[194] The government experienced significant backlash with the new enforcement measures, with some commentators – such as the National Post‘s Randall Denley, a former PC politician[195] – equating the province to a “police state“[196] Members of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Table described the new restrictions as “absolute madness”, and not based on science questioning the need to restrict “safe options from people as you do nothing to impact the places where the disease is spreading”.[197] After dozens of police services across the province announced that they would refuse to enforce the new measures,[198] Ford promptly rolled back the new enforcement provisions the next day and reopened playgrounds, while keeping other outdoor amenities closed.[199][200]
Dear Mr. Cooper: Let me get this straight: You want me to “Stand With Doug” and send some money? No way. Doug Ford has presided over the greatest destruction of citizens rights this province has ever seen. Since March, 2020, Doug Ford has vacuumed away the Charter rights of Ontarians to freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, freedom of movement. We have gone through long periods of stay at home orders, a form of house arrest. But the victims have committed no crime, faced no charge, had no trial or an opportunity to defend themselves. They have just been punished.The Ford government has acted as if there were no Charter of Rights and Freedoms
The right to gather and worship, gone or severely restricted. The right to gather with family for meals or worship at Christmas and Easter, gone. Doug Ford closed schools, ruled one business essential and it could stay open with shifting restrictions, but another business must close. Thousands of businesses closed and ruined; tens of thousands of Ontario workers made jobless. Mobility rights, freedom of assembly, freedom to protest stomped on. I believed in the populism of Ford Nation. My belief began to fade when Doug Ford dismissed END THE LOCKDOWN protesters rallying at Queen’s Park, many of them ardent Ford Nation supporters, as “a bunch of yahoos”. I watched as Ontario turned into a police state. A Christian church in Aylmer had been fined over $100,000 for the “crime” of gathering together to worship the Lord. Its Pastor Henry Hildebrandt was conducting a service. His congregation were singing hymns. In strode a sheriff backed up by local police. The congregation was ordered out. The church locks changed by court order. No, this was not North Korea; it was Ford’s Ontario. Oh, and the police had blocked all roads to the church, as if engaged in some drug takedown. Then there was Adamson’s Barbecue in Etobicoke. Owner Adam Skelly made the mistake of thinking he could serve up barbecue to willing customers. Over 100 Metro police and the cavalry descended on the restaurant to drag Mr. Skelly off to jail. The police state goon squad might have suggested a biker’s convention. On May 23, Hamilton was the scene of something that might have been out of a Monty Python skit. Local police stormed out of a building to slap tickets with hefty fines on peaceful protesters who opposed the lockdown. The insane pièce de resistance was the double fining of a Rebel reporter. He received a fine under the lying and misnamed “Re-opening Ontario Act” for being in a public gathering of more than five persons. He received a further municipal fine for shaking hands with another consenting adult. Yes, shaking hands in Doug Ford’s Ontario is now illegal. One of the darkest days for civil rights in Ontario was April 16. The government authorized police to pull over pedestrians and motorists and demand that they justify being away from their home. It sounded like some grade B movie from the 1940s with some surly police agent demanding: “Where are your papers?” What is scandalous is that this was a cabinet decision. Doug Ford and his cabinet had met and discussed this police state measure. Sylvia Jones, a lawyer, had seen no problem with trampling the rights of taxpaying Ontarians and their right to be free from intrusive police checks? True, most police forces announced they would not be making such stops. Good, but it was Doug Ford and his band of freedom thieves who had sought to tighten police state rules on Ontarians. The announcement was walked back a little, but not entirely: Police can stop motorists or pedestrians if they think they’re participating in a public gathering of over five persons. Ontarians can look with envy at US States such as Florida or Texas. There businesses are open, restaurants are open, bars are open. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has FORBIDDEN local governments and school boards from imposing the hated masks on people. Oh, yes, these free states are not cesspools of disease; They have lower infection rates than Ontario, which has groaned under eight months of lockdown tyranny! And you expect my donation to further enable this tyrant! No way. Paul FrommDirectorCANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR FREE EXPRESSION I, Margi and Paul in East Lansing, Michigan to speak in 2007.
The state of religious freedom in Canada. Ask Manitoba’s Premier Pol Pot Pallister. “Defiant pastor on the run from police in Manitoba, will only be arrested at church”
For decades now, Canada has been a place of refuge for individuals fleeing government tyranny and religious persecution, a place where people could aspire to a better life. Yet now, in real time, we are watching the unravelling of our fundamental rights and freedoms, the very glue that bonds us together, and this is all being done under the cheap guise of “public health and safety.”
This brings me to Pastor Tobias Tissen, a minister at The Church of God in Steinbach, Manitoba.
The situation he has found himself in is truly incredible. As he alludes to here in our exclusive sitdown interview, he is a man of God, a principled man, and one whose family fled to Canada hoping to avoid the very situation he finds himself in today.
He is part of an unofficial group of five in Manitoba who were all given warrants on the same day, but unlike the other four, who have signed the conditions of their release, Tobias knows he cannot, because it would mean he would be unable to host church services.
He does not want to silently allow for his arrest — he does not want to be detained while no one is watching, because he knows the Manitoba government is trying to do this under the radar.
That said, Pastor Tobias has been in communication with law enforcement and has told them very clearly when and where he would submit himself to authorities. If they want to arrest this pastor, they will have to do it at the church.
![](https://thumbnails.cbc.ca/maven_legacy/thumbnails/116/755/mb-bernierincustody-210611_2500kbps_1280x720_1908188227816.jpg?crop=1.777xh:h;*,*&downsize=510px:* 510w")
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/news/gta/2021/06/06/statue-of-egerton-ryerson-toppled-at-university-after-rally-for-residential-school-victims/_6_ryerson_statue_fist.jpg)
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/news/gta/2021/06/06/statue-of-egerton-ryerson-toppled-at-university-after-rally-for-residential-school-victims/_5_ryerson_statue_book.jpg)
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/news/gta/2021/06/06/statue-of-egerton-ryerson-toppled-at-university-after-rally-for-residential-school-victims/_2_ryerson_statue_crowd_flag.jpg)
