EZRA LEVANT ｜ Trudeau’s hand-picked censors declare that only 1% of what Rebel News publishes is news — so they won’t give us a government news licence
A government censorship panel has declared that Rebel News journalists are not qualified to be journalists because only 1% of our content meets the criteria for a government journalism license. We're suing the government of Canada for denying us a license to do journalism.
00:06:52.780Our specialty is getting out into the, out of the office and going into the streets, going to where the news is happening
00:06:59.060and turning our cameras on and showing it to you. The last two years have really been our time to shine.
00:07:04.520We've covered protests against lockdowns. We've covered the trucker rebellion.
00:07:09.100There was one day, I remember, when we had 17 different journalists in nine different cities covering the news.
00:07:15.280And it was on a weekend. Just take February 5th for an example. I was so proud on a weekend.
00:07:20.340Our guys were working so hard, I tweeted. This is what I said.
00:07:23.140I said, we've got reporters today in Milk River, Coutts, Toronto, Ottawa, Quebec City, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and even Canberra, Australia.
00:07:36.320Our reporters were just sitting in our offices giving our opinions on the world like most of the media party does, like this CBC star did.
00:07:44.620I do ask that because, you know, given Canada's support of Ukraine in this current crisis with Russia, I don't know if it's far-fetched to ask, but there is concern that Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as this protest grows, but perhaps even instigating it from the outset.
00:08:05.700Well, again, I'm going to defer to our partners in the public safety, the trained officials and experts in that area.
00:08:14.940That's not news. That's a Trudeau conspiracy theory.
00:08:18.100Now, normally, I wouldn't care what Trudeau thinks about us, but his handpicked government censorship panel has tremendous power over us.
00:08:25.240They have the power of taxation, and the power to tax is the power to destroy, and they're taking more and more powers.
00:08:33.200This is a journalism license from the government, and we were just denied it.
00:08:37.780Censorship is Trudeau's most passionate obsession.
00:09:33.020Mr. Trudeau, the only reason that I'm allowed to ask you this question is because today the federal court ruled that the government doesn't have the right to determine who is or is not a journalist.
00:09:48.100This is the second election in a row that the court had to overturn your government.
00:09:53.200Do you still insist on being able to make that decision and why?
00:09:56.860First of all, questions around accreditation were handled by the Press Gallery and the Consortium of Networks who have strong perspectives on quality journalism and the important information that is shared with Canadians.
00:10:14.020The reality is organizations like yours that continue to spread misinformation and disinformation on the science around vaccines,
00:10:29.020around how we're going to actually get through this pandemic and be there for each other and keep our kids safe is part of why we're seeing such unfortunate anger and lack of understanding of basic science.
00:10:46.580And quite frankly, I won't call it a media organization, your group of individuals need to take accountability for some of the polarization that we're seeing in this country.
00:11:01.620And I think Canadians are cluing into the fact that there is a really important decision we take about the kind of country we want to see.
00:11:10.900And I salute all extraordinary, hardworking journalists that put science and facts at the heart of what they do and ask me tough questions every day.
00:11:21.000But make sure that they are educating and informing Canadians from a broad range of perspectives, which is the last thing that you guys do.
00:11:31.600Trudeau is not prime ministerial. He's petty and partisan. He's so thin-skinned.
00:11:35.640Listen to how he answered a great question from another reporter of ours who was there, Alexa Lavois.
00:15:54.380I mean, here they give a few examples.
00:15:55.900So seriously, just by crediting someone else for, let's say, breaking a scoop, which is the ethical thing to do when we refer to someone else's previous work,
00:16:05.180that suddenly means that what we're doing is no longer news?
00:16:09.820I should say that the vast majority of our journalism is completely original.
00:16:13.100It's going places and pointing our camera at things.
00:16:15.720But seriously, they're claiming that when we give the odd shout out to other media, that makes us fake news or something.
00:16:23.000Literally, every journalist does that or should be doing that.
00:16:25.840I mean, the Toronto Star, the CBC, they do that from time to time.
00:16:29.060But that's a reason Trudeau is denying our status.
00:17:48.380But you need one of these journalism licenses to issue a basic receipt to your paying subscribers for them to claim it's an expense on their taxes.
00:17:57.040So if you have a subscription to the left-wing pro-Trudeau Toronto Star, you can take your receipt and claim that subscription on your taxes because they have the Trudeau-approved journalism license.
00:18:08.120Our viewers can't do that because Trudeau doesn't think we're real news.
00:18:15.640It's an attack on people who have a different point of view than Trudeau using the CRA.
00:18:21.920And just this week, Trudeau's new censorship minister, Pablo Rodriguez, announced that there will be even more laws censoring the media, especially in the Internet.
00:18:30.640He says he's going to demand that Facebook and Google now artificially promote Canadian news sites pumping them up in their algorithms, but only those Trudeau-approved media with his journalism license get that promotion.
00:18:47.480Other media, by default, get pushed down.
00:18:51.280So it's not just Trudeau who is punishing journalists he doesn't like.
00:18:55.640He's forcing Facebook and Google to punish his enemies, too.
00:19:00.680I'll let you read their whole punishment letter for yourself.
00:19:35.020Rebel News seeks a declaration that the QCJO refusal is unreasonable and unlawful and an order quashing the QCJO refusal.
00:19:44.440Rebel News also seeks an order directing the Canada Revenue Agency to reverse the QCJO refusal and to designate Rebel News as a qualified Canadian journalism organization pursuant to the Income Tax Act.
00:19:55.040That's how we put it to the federal court when we were banned by Trudeau from attending the election debates.
00:20:01.920Now, we point out that Trudeau is one of the worst censors we've ever met so far in the world.
00:20:08.140Rebel News has been granted media accreditation by governments in Canada, the United States, both the White House and Congress, United Kingdom, European Union, Sweden, Netherlands, Israel, Poland, and India.
00:20:20.160Rebel News has also been granted accreditation in partly free countries, such as Iraq and Morocco.
00:20:26.920Rebel News has also approved media at the United Kingdom Court of Appeal and the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court, amongst others.
00:20:47.520Rebel News then followed up with CRA on its QCJO application numerous times between August 8, 2021 and November 10, 2021.
00:20:56.620On November 10, 2021, Rebel News was advised that its QCJO application had been reassigned to other CRA staff.
00:21:04.460Rebel News made multiple offers during this period to discuss its application with CRA staff.
00:21:10.120Upon further follow-up by Rebel News, CRA advised on January 26, 2022, and February 22, 2022, that the QCJO application was still being reviewed and discussed internally.
00:21:22.980But that's a lie by Trudeau, actually.
00:21:25.460As you can see, they had already blacklisted us before then.
00:21:49.400Rebel News is generally critical of government action or inaction and has a mission statement to, quote, tell the other side of the story.
00:21:56.320Rebel News is akin to an official opposition to legacy media and government narratives as a counterweight to the dominant point of view.
00:22:05.040Rebel News is one of the few Canadian media outlets having the power, freedom, and will to meaningfully challenge government figures and policies in the political views presented in Canada's legacy media.
00:22:14.900So when Trudeau's censorship panel says we take a particular point of view, well, I don't know, maybe we do sometimes like most humans do.
00:22:22.400But it's just that they hate our point of view because it's independent.
00:22:26.580And by the way, we don't just scorch Trudeau liberals.
00:22:28.820Ask Doug Ford and Jason Kenney, the alleged conservatives, how we treat them.
00:22:34.740Rebel News seeks to set aside assumptions and prejudices and to find facts that are overlooked or ignored by mainstream media.
00:22:42.120Rebel News is a frequent critic of Canada's federal and provincial governments, and in particular of the governments of Alberta, Ontario, and the government of Canada, including their respective premiers and prime minister.
00:22:54.880Rebel News is a member of the Independent Press Gallery of Canada.
00:22:58.260Rebel News has become a well-known media organization which is accessible to Canadians and uses its platform to not only share news stories, but to report on entities to defend civil liberties and hold those entities accountable.
00:23:09.960Rebel News takes the independence of the press seriously.
00:23:21.360Rebel News does not promote a particular perspective any more than many other outlets that have previously received the QCJO designation.
00:23:29.100It seeks to tell another side of a story regardless of the perspective that side may have.
00:23:33.400Sometimes that results in a conservative law and order-oriented story, while other times the story is about overreach or selective enforcement by authorities, both being the other side of stories not being pursued by mainstream media.
00:23:46.520To do this, Rebel News seeks multiple perspectives and grants opportunities for rebuttal or to simply comment on the story, both of which allow Rebel News to present alternative perspectives as set out in the guidelines.
00:24:11.680We're demanding to look at all the records by Trudeau's censors, everything they looked at to make their censorship decision, their briefing notes, their research, their analysis, their conversations with politicians and the politician's staff, their draft reports, everything.
00:24:36.260In the last page there, you can see we've hired two outstanding lawyers, Robert Hawks, Queen's Counsel, and Sarah Miller, the top gun lawyer who's been fighting for Pastor Arthur Pawlowski, because this is a brutal battle against censorship.
00:24:51.280Trudeau really does want to stamp us out.
00:24:53.680Look, we don't want any of Trudeau's money.
00:24:56.440We want our freedom and our independence.
00:24:59.380His journalism license is un-Canadian.
00:25:02.540And denying that license to us has the effect of censoring us, not just banning us from press conferences, which is bad enough, but also denying us equal treatment under the Income Tax Act, and forcing Google and Facebook to censor us too.
00:25:15.600We have to fight back, we have to take them to the federal court where we have beat Trudeau's censors twice in a row now.
00:25:23.900Please go to WeAreSuingTrudeau.com, read their punishment letter denying us the journalism license.
00:26:26.420I really think Trudeau's obsessed with us.
00:26:30.160I think the reason he's obsessed with us has to do with that Ash conformity test.
00:26:36.060As long as there's one other voice in the country saying Trudeau's wrong, you're not crazy, he is, that inspires people.
00:26:42.640That's why the truckers were so successful, is that the truckers were proof to millions of Canadians they weren't alone in saying we're in a terrible place.
00:26:52.940And that's why Trudeau doesn't just need 99% of media on his side.
00:26:59.080That last 1% is the most important 1% to get rid of.
00:27:06.440And neither is my friend, our chief reporter, Sheila Gunn-Reed, who this week has shown the importance of Rebel News and telling the other side of the story and being counter to the official government narrative.
00:27:17.800She joins me now via Skype from her headquarters in Edmonton.
00:27:26.960Well, I love Twitter too much, a little bit of an addict.
00:27:29.960I'm even more excited about it since Elon Musk joined the board.
00:27:33.200But I've been following on Twitter your close coverage of a trial in which Dina Hinshaw, Alberta's public health officer, is being grilled at great length on her decisions.
00:27:47.700I think this is the first time in Canada, and maybe it's the first time in America, because I don't recall seeing it, that a public health officer under oath is being grilled not just for hours, but for days about her decisions.
00:28:00.700I do dare say this is the first time I've seen it.
00:28:04.120Tell me about the trial a little bit and who's there, who's who in the zoo, and what you've heard so far.
00:28:08.380Sure. So this is a trial on behalf, it's a lawsuit, really, on behalf of two churches in southern Alberta in Medicine Hat, and then a gym owner, and then another person.
00:28:21.980And they are suing not only the Alberta government, but also the chief medical officer of health, who happens to be Dina Hinshaw, for violating their charter rights with these constant edicts and restrictions on their businesses and places of worship.
00:28:36.960And we're at the portion of the lawsuit wherein Dina Hinshaw is being cross-examined on her evidence, and we've got two lawyers from the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, and we've got Jeffrey Rath, he's another lawyer who's representing a gym owner in this.
00:28:54.400And they are meticulously cross-examined on her evidence, and they sat down, and they, God bless these men, went through 400 separate Dina Hinshaw press conferences.
00:29:10.960Because early in the pandemic, she said the only place to find reliable information about the pandemic was basically Alberta Health Services and other official government agencies, the World Health Organization, and otherwise you were spreading misinformation.
00:29:27.840And she called people at the time who did not buy into the official government narrative with regard to COVID and vaccines and lockdowns, naysayers, conspiracy theorists.
00:29:40.140And my favourite term that she used was non-believers and unbelievers, as though this is some sort of religious cult, and based on the rituals I see from that side of the aisle, I'm willing to hear those arguments.
00:29:53.900And they went through her press conferences, and they pointed out, okay, well, you told people to be wary of misinformation.
00:30:02.640Okay, yep, you did. Next day, you told people that vaccines were 80% effective upon the first dose.
00:30:11.620And, you know, they just went through all the misinformation that she had been sharing in her daily press conferences,
00:30:18.040while she had been accusing other people of misinformation.
00:30:22.740And really, you know, she behaves completely the same way that we see as Albertans when she takes to the podium to give her daily and now weekly press conferences.
00:30:33.780Basically, you know, that same cloying, condescending way that she talks to Albertans, that we're all in this together, we have to take care of each other.
00:30:42.360And she's excusing away the misinformation she spread, and the overreaction of the government by saying, well, that's just the information that we had at the time available, so this is what we did.
00:30:54.380And she has used the phrase sparingly and sparsely several times in court to describe the edicts that she brought down that did such terrible things as limit people's churches to 15% capacity,
00:31:09.440to funerals, regardless of the size of the church, to just 10 people, to closed restaurants, to indoor dining.
00:31:18.320She calls that sparingly and sparsely.
00:31:20.880Yeah. You know, everyone just played a giant game of Simon Says, or I guess Anthony Fauci Says, and they just all repeated each other.
00:31:32.800And I'd like to point out that Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner who now works as a Pfizer executive, he said something astonishing.
00:31:44.120And this is a former FDA commissioner.
00:31:46.060He said, no one knows where the six feet separation came from.
00:32:02.360I saw some explanation somewhere that, well, two meters is safer than one meter, so let's do two meters.
00:32:07.780I saw a case somewhere where regulators came in with tape measures.
00:32:12.800And if something was an inch less than six feet, well, science says that one inch is putting you in peril.
00:32:18.040There was the separation of two different barbershop chairs.
00:32:21.780And that whole fake public health theater, no one knows where the rumor came from.
00:32:30.880It's like, I don't know, like a ghost story or an internet myth.
00:32:34.920And to see Scott Gottlieb said, yeah, no one knows where that came from.
00:32:39.340And to see people like Dina Hinshaw be so, I mean, talk about a believer.
00:32:45.840She's the zealot who was acting like the one going based on faith rather than science.
00:32:52.740Yeah, I mean, and just complete nonsense.
00:32:57.740At one point, she was asked, basically, what happened to all the instances of flu?
00:33:05.560She was cross-examined on her evidence, and I believe it was Leighton Gray with the Justice Center.
00:33:11.240He said, you reported on, I think it was April 9th, actually, 2021.
00:33:17.880You got up in your daily press conference and said, great news, we made it through flu season of 4.5 million Albertans, by the way, without a single reported instance of influenza.
00:33:55.460How could you make this outlandish declaration, basically?
00:33:58.460And she said, well, it's because the flu responded to the restrictions that we were making on your home, on your life, how far you had to stay away from each other, forcing masks onto your kids, the hypochondriac handwashing before you come into a grocery store, following the arrows, I guess, on the floor.
00:34:18.720She said the flu responded to those things, but not the disease that was designed to respond to those things.
00:34:45.460And I know that in Alberta, there are some atrocious judges.
00:34:49.060I know that because one of them named Adam Germain was so bizarre in his ruling of Arthur Pawlowski.
00:34:55.980He absolutely, obviously, lives in terror, this judge, Adam Germain, of COVID, because he says, everyone in the province knows someone who has died.
00:35:05.440We must and you must read this statement saying you are a believer in COVID-19.
00:35:11.700It was such a crazy judge who obviously wasn't, in fact, who acknowledged he hadn't read, even bothered to read Arthur Pawlowski's lawyer's documents.
00:35:22.280Arthur Pawlowski had one of the best lawyers in the province, but it doesn't matter if you've got a crummy judge who is personally terrified of COVID, was too lazy to read the documents, and just hated the cut of Pawlowski's jib.
00:35:36.840The fact that Adam Germain is a former liberal candidate, I think probably had something to do with it, too.
00:36:02.160Just, sorry, Justice Barbara Romain is the one presiding over this hearing.
00:36:06.000And in my opinion, and I've watched a ton of these court cases, she is taking her job very seriously.
00:36:13.760But there are points at which, where she seems to be objective before health services lawyers do.
00:36:19.800So that makes me kind of anxious because you can see that she is sort of losing patience with Rath, Jeffrey Rath, and with Leighton Gray, as they are doing their best to try to get answers out of Dina Hinshaw.
00:36:36.920And she doesn't really seem to be giving a lot of those.
00:36:39.060And before Alberta Health Services lawyers can launch an objection, she's stopping and asking them to, you know, you've asked this, she's answered, move on.
00:36:51.680And that makes me very nervous for how this is going to go.
00:36:54.740Today, court broke for the afternoon because some questions were posed to Dina Hinshaw that could be covered under cabinet confidentiality.
00:37:24.720And the judge said that she will ask those questions of Hinshaw in private and then make a decision on whether or not those answers are relevant to the case.
00:37:55.200I'm so proud of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms for championing it.
00:37:59.220And it's just such an aching reminder of the absence of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association or any other.
00:38:06.040I mean, this is actually, it sounds unique in all of North America.
00:38:08.840I may be missing some case in the United States.
00:38:10.980Imagine if every public health tyrant, and I call him a tyrant in the old Latin meaning of that sense, is an emergency dictator who's not bound by the legislatures.
00:38:23.140As RFK Jr. told our Democracy Fund town hall the other day, and he's a real liberal, when there's a regulation, there has to be a public hearing and a public consultation.
00:38:32.380And there has to be the cost-benefit analysis, and what are the side effects of this?
00:38:39.880Like I say, Scott Gottlieb said someone just made up the six-foot thing, and everyone said six feet, six feet, like they were a bunch of pigeons or seagulls.
00:38:48.820Me, me, me, six feet, six feet, six feet.
00:38:55.300I'm not saying she's tyrannical in her personality.
00:38:57.680In fact, she's a very low-energy, sort of pitiful personality.
00:39:01.340But those are the worst tyrants because they're deceptive.
00:39:06.320And I congratulate the plaintiffs and the lawyers for doing this.
00:39:10.900If only every one of these TV tyrants, these MD tyrants had been subjected to this grilling.
00:39:18.260To make them think about these things for the first time in their lives, to challenge them for the basis they have, we need this kind of a truth and reconciliation post-mortem.
00:39:28.780I can assure you that whatever commissions of inquiry are struck, if they even are, I mean, who would you even trust to put on an independent commission of inquiry?
00:39:40.100Who doesn't have their own hands in what's happened over the last year?
00:39:45.660What politician, governor or opposition, what judge, what college of physicians?
00:39:51.180Like, is there a single person of authority in this country who is not complicit?
00:39:56.260I don't even know who I would trust to have some sort of inquiry.
00:40:00.220And this sounds like it may well be the only time we have some accountability questions.
00:40:04.760And it seems like the judge is doing her best to block for the witness.
00:40:08.640And the witness doesn't have much to say.
00:40:10.960Yeah, this is as close as I think we are going to get to holding any one of these public health officials to account.
00:40:18.320Because at the beginning of the pandemic, Dina Hinshaw, she got a raise.
00:40:22.580We can hold the politicians who listened to her to account.
00:40:26.200But she will continue, whether she's a success or an absolute failure, continue to make at least two times what the premier of Alberta makes.
00:40:36.700She's one of the highest paid bureaucrats in the province.
00:40:39.500And this is the only time that she will be held account and made to answer for her decisions.
00:40:45.820And, you know, she's being pressed on.
00:40:48.680Did you consider the bankruptcies that would result from these things?
00:40:53.180Did you consider that you would drive people to suicide?
00:40:57.100Did you consider that this spike in opioid deaths is related to the lockdown and serve?
00:41:04.500You know, she's being asked those sorts of questions.
00:41:06.260And I'm not even sure if she's ever actually even thought about this stuff before when she was making her edicts.
00:41:12.120What it meant to sign your name to the bottom of the court paper that closed Grace Life Church and drove hundreds of Christians underground.
00:41:21.580I don't think she's ever even thought about it.
00:41:24.440You know, I remember when Dina Hinshaw got up there at a press conference and claimed that a teenager, a child of young years, had died from COVID.
00:41:32.640And that was a very important argument for her because it was an attempt to say, no, no, no.
00:41:37.600This disease is of great risk to everyone.
00:41:40.060Not just old people, fat people, sick people.
00:42:16.860That actually was touched upon by the lawyers in court.
00:42:19.880And the implication was that she would use, this is what the lawyers are arguing, she would use the deaths of these children before a vaccine rollout for that demographic, for that age group.
00:42:33.380So before they rolled out the vaccine for kids under the age of 18, she brought up this 14-year-old who she said had died of COVID instead of with COVID.
00:42:43.760By the way, it sounds like that young man got COVID while he was in hospital.
00:42:51.520The second time she did this was when she did a public announcement of a child under the age of two that died of COVID.
00:42:58.280And this sort of, the lawyers pointed out, this coincides with when they made vaccines available for kids under the age of 11.
00:43:05.300So this announcement was sort of made to, as the lawyers said, terrorize parents into getting their kids vaccinated.
00:43:13.160And she, Dina Hinshaw, did not have the permission of the family to release information about the death of that 14-year-old boy.
00:43:21.180She said she removed enough identifying details from the case to make it difficult for people to know who the kid was, but the parents sure knew.
00:43:32.480And the only time that they ever, you know, sort of reassessed why the young man died was when the family gave her the business end of a phone call.
00:43:42.300Otherwise, that would have just hung out there in the public ethos that this was a death of a young child due to COVID when it was brain cancer.
00:43:51.180Yeah, Dina Hinshaw is guilty of Jeffrey Epstein levels of evil.
00:43:56.460I mean, imagine taking dead children and turning them into press releases to sell pharma.
00:45:12.380I try to put my commentary in brackets.
00:45:14.020But I think people should remember that we have been in the meat grinder of Dina Hinshaw's edicts for two years.
00:45:24.220And when I say we, I mean, as journalists, we are the ones on the scene, not always affected by the lockdown because we're journalists and, you know, we didn't lose our jobs because of it.
00:45:34.980But we are the ones telling the stories of the people who are being so grievously harmed by these edicts that she makes from a desk in Edmonton.
00:45:44.220She doesn't have to talk to Tim Stephens' family or Art Poloski's family or Ms. Ingram.
00:45:52.840She's a gym owner, a single mom whose life was actually completely destroyed by these edicts.
00:45:58.220She doesn't know Chris Scott or his employees or any number of the people who go to Grace Life Church who were forced underground because of her edicts.
00:46:08.240So, when we're covering this, it's hard to keep your opinions to yourself because, boy, I've got a ton of them because I've talked to enough people harmed by Dina Hinshaw.
00:46:44.700Ever since Noam Chomsky showed his true colors with his wicked comments about starving the I'm Vax, I could not care less about what he believes or thinks.
00:46:52.740His true worries are about his personal clock running out.
00:46:55.740He spent his life talking to others about problems and never fixed any himself.
00:46:59.540You know, I mean, I guess I hadn't followed him a lot since I interviewed him seven years ago.
00:47:05.020I'll be honest, I actually hadn't followed him since then.
00:47:10.100And I was talking to him about his, you know, media concentration stuff and his views on Israel or whatever.
00:47:16.960So I appreciate you bringing, emphasizing his bizarre comments about the unvaxxed.
00:47:23.100Yeah, I think he's lost his moral compass.
00:47:25.500Michael Stevenson says manufacturing consent was the playbook for lockdowns.
00:47:30.700Well, and, you know, if you thought media control was a problem, you know, 50 years ago, imagine it in the age of digital control where you can just censor the algorithm.
00:47:42.960Albert Finnan says, Hey, Rebel News, why don't you have Gab.com on your share side?
00:48:23.380When churches were no longer able to gather thanks to COVID health orders in Manitoba, one pastor stood above the rest in defiance.
00:48:31.280Now Quarantine Tickets, Pastor Tobias Thyssen fights on.
00:48:34.540Over a year ago, he defied COVID emergency orders by attending protests against said COVID emergency orders,
00:48:40.580and more grievously, for practicing his religion.
00:48:43.400This was seen by the state as a defying public gathering limits of no greater than five.
00:48:48.240Tobias was fined thousands for this alone.
00:48:50.480Group gatherings of over five people are restricted, and that means there's a rule against that, so don't do it.
00:48:56.680The Church of God, which Pastor Tobias belongs to, was also fined $5,000 for hosting in-person church service.
00:49:02.980And after a battle with RCMP over parking lot access, they were later fined for drive-in church services as well.
00:49:09.380Both forms of worship were considered illegal at that time.
00:49:12.000Tickets and non-compliance continued until months later when a warrant for six individuals for multiple breaches of so-called public health and safety measures ensued.
00:49:22.340Over a period of months, and after the issuance of multiple tickets and repeated attempts to educate,
00:49:27.020members of the Public Safety Investigations Unit obtained warrants of arrest for six individuals.
00:49:31.600They stem from breaches of the public health orders.
00:49:34.240Pastor Tobias was one of those individuals, and we caught up with him while the warrant was active to hear his side of the story.
00:49:41.140He continued hosting church services despite the warrant and stated that authorities would have to arrest him at the church,
00:49:47.120where he continued to present himself during church services.
00:49:50.480While this warrant was active, Pastor Tobias faced what he would call Gestapo tactics,
00:49:55.580much like his family had fled Europe from in years past.
00:49:58.160I've had ancestors in Russia that were being persecuted for their faith.
00:50:05.680They would be, the Christian leaders would be picked up at church, taken to the police station,
00:50:12.060and said, this is the fine, you're not leaving here until you paid.
00:50:16.640And then from there it got worse to where they got arrested, and in a lot of cases killed.
00:50:21.980His church also now faced a potential $1 million fine.
00:50:26.040Pastor Tobias continued on without being arrested until October 18th,
00:50:30.600when the RCMP arrested him in front of his crying children,
00:50:34.040as opposed to the church where he had frequently presented himself for arrest.