Canada has an eerie ‘police state’ feel lately

By Andrea Widburg, AM THINKER

Canada lacks the miracle that is the United States Constitution. Still, as befits a nation the once-free British founded, it is a country that has traditionally had a few of what we consider to be core English freedoms – freedom of speech, worship, assembly, etc. Those concepts seem far away now, as Justin Trudeau and the various provincial and municipal governments use COVID as an excuse to crack down on those liberties.

I’ve written before about Canada’s draconian and expensive hotel rule for people returning by air from overseas travel. It’s gotten so bad that people are flying into the U.S. and driving to their home country to avoid the hotel restriction.

That inconvenience, though, is small potatoes compared to what else is going on in a country that, as of April 30, has had an average of only 653 COVID deaths per million citizens. By contrast, France had 1,530 deaths per million, Germany has had 997 deaths per million, England has had 1,903 deaths per million, and America has had 1,744 deaths per million.

In other words, as the vaccine ramps up, treatments improve, and we get better at protecting the at-risk elderly, Canada should be relaxing its restrictions – but that’s not what’s happening. Two men, however, are fighting back.

One of those people is already familiar to American Thinker readers. A month ago, American Thinker posted a video of Pastor Artur Pawlowski, who grew up in communist Poland, kicking the Canadian police out of his church. They had come to stop a worship service that exceeded the 15% capacity limit Canada imposes on religious worship. (As a thought experiment, ask yourself if the government would do the same to a mosque.)Pawlowski insisted (a) that the police come back with a warrant before he would let them into his church and (b) that they communicate with him solely through his lawyer. What happened, instead, was that, on Wednesday, the same officials returned directly to him, not his lawyer, with an extremely specific type of warrant – a secret warrant.

According to Rebel News, a conservative Canadian internet outlet, the government obtained the warrant in a secret hearing, despite knowing the identity of Pawlowski’s attorney. The warrant fails to state the evidentiary grounds that justified its issuance. Instead, it simply empowers the state to go into Pawlowski’s church during services (something that ordinarily is barred under applicable law) and to arrest anyone who resists.

Pawlowski is planning to go ahead with services today, and it’s likely the event will end in his arrest. During a conversation with Jesse Kelly, Pawlowski explained that, having grown up behind the Iron Curtain, he knows what’s happening. Moreover, he says that religious people “are a pack of lions” who will “never bow before hyenas.”

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In other words, on matters of conscience, Pawlowski answers to a higher judge than the Canadian government.

Chris Sky is a different kind of conscientious objector in the face of Canada’s burgeoning tyranny. Last September, Vice news reported with dripping disdain about Chris Saccoccia (Sky’s given name):

A wealthy man who has become one of Canada’s most well-known anti-maskers is attempting to open up a network of private schools for the children of his followers to ride out the pandemic.

Chris Saccoccia, the son of a wealthy developer, is a childless man who founded a group called Mothers Against Social Distancing, whose Facebook page boasts 4,500 followers. Saccoccia, who goes by Chris Sky online, has been hyping “Private-On-Demand Education Inc.” online for weeks to his thousands of, mostly middle-aged women, followers,

Could you get a nastier (and more sexist) diss than referring to a man’s followers as “mostly middle-aged women”? Of course, it’s not true, a Canadian friend told me that, in April, her daughter, along with hundreds of other young people, was going to head for an anti-mask rally at a Vancouver beach.

And indeed, hundreds of young people did rally. This video shows Sky speaking to a crowd at the Sunset Beach protest that my friend’s daughter attended:

The Canadian government has responded to Sky’s popular message by placing him on its no-fly list and arresting him, as happened just three days ago.

Americans need to take seriously what’s happening in Canada. When Trump was president, we had a bulwark against this totalitarianism. With Biden in the White House, there’s no saying how far the government will go to continue using COVID as a justification to strip Americans of their civil liberties.

May 1, 2021 | Comments »

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