Juno News - Court indefinitely extends lockout of Trinity Bible Chapel

00:00:00.000 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:00:06.220 On the previous show, I spoke to Pastor Jacob Rayome of the Trinity Bible Chapel,

00:00:11.540 who at the time was just a few days away from having received a court order shutting down the doors of his church,

00:00:20.280 locking the doors, changing the locks, actually, at the behest of Ontario's Attorney General.

00:00:25.160 And this was going to be for one week.

00:00:26.640 It locked out the church for one particular service.

00:00:29.160 And there was another court date on Thursday in which the Ontario Attorney General

00:00:34.740 sought to have this order extended to keep the church locked out.

00:00:38.380 And after a rather brief hearing, the judge granted it.

00:00:42.420 He said nothing has changed.

00:00:44.180 That was basically, and I'm paraphrasing his point,

00:00:46.660 he said the pandemic circumstances, according to the government, have not changed.

00:00:50.780 And the position of the church, which is that if they're allowed in the building,

00:00:54.080 they're going to have service, has not changed.

00:00:56.240 So the order was extended.

00:00:59.160 Now, the big issue with it is that this is now an indefinite order.

00:01:03.040 The church will be locked out of its building indefinitely until such a time

00:01:08.220 as the parties can go back to court and have a sanctions hearing that deals with things

00:01:13.100 in a bit more of an evidentiary way,

00:01:15.100 or until the restrictions go up to 30% capacity,

00:01:19.320 as opposed to the 10-person cap they're at now.

00:01:22.420 And the reason for that is that the police were never charging the church

00:01:25.980 when they were allowed to have 30% capacity in the building.

00:01:29.380 So that seemed to be a rule that they either were not breaking

00:01:32.880 or not in an ostentatious enough way that the government was knocking on their door,

00:01:37.800 or should I say pounding on their door.

00:01:39.700 Now, right now, we have a situation in which a pastor and his congregation

00:01:45.460 are indefinitely locked out of their church building

00:01:49.120 in a country that supposedly values freedom of religion.

00:01:53.920 Now, this is huge.

00:01:55.160 And I was speaking earlier on in the show with Premier Jason Kenney about this,

00:01:58.420 and he said he respects that libertarian spirit,

00:02:01.220 that freedom-minded spirit that people in Alberta have,

00:02:03.680 and I would say, frankly, people in more provinces should have.

00:02:07.220 The problem with folks like that now

00:02:09.720 is that they are finding the boot of government on the back of their neck,

00:02:12.820 pressing them up against the concrete ground

00:02:15.220 if they want to exercise those very rights and those very freedoms.

00:02:20.520 And I should say, and I'm not a lawyer,

00:02:22.320 I sometimes play one on TV in the sense that I cover legal cases,

00:02:25.900 so I've had to develop somewhat of an understanding about how these things work.

00:02:29.900 But people were asking me on Twitter the other day,

00:02:31.980 well, hang on, how is this constitutional?

00:02:34.160 And in short, it's not.

00:02:35.740 And the government in the past has conceded

00:02:38.220 that its restrictions violate the Constitution.

00:02:41.660 They've simply said that they are justified in violating

00:02:45.160 because of that so-called reasonable limit section

00:02:48.100 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

00:02:50.360 But none of that factored into the case.

00:02:52.240 The constitutional question is something that has to be weighed

00:02:55.300 in a bigger trial down the road.

00:02:58.020 This was just a very narrowly focused question.

00:03:00.780 The judge specifically said,

00:03:02.120 listen, I'm not here today to look at the constitutional questions.

00:03:05.500 I'm here to look at, are they going to keep breaking the law?

00:03:08.300 Are they going to keep violating this order?

00:03:10.160 And if so, are the restrictions still going to be there?

00:03:13.060 And if so, all right, we've got to keep those locks on the doors.

00:03:17.380 Lisa Bildy, who I believe has been on this show before,

00:03:19.880 if not, we should get her on.

00:03:21.220 She was a tremendous, well, is a tremendous lawyer.

00:03:23.480 She represented True North and me

00:03:25.900 when we were going up against the Leaders Debates Commission.

00:03:28.900 She's with the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.

00:03:32.100 Lisa Bildy did a tremendous job in court. 1.00

00:03:34.440 She said, listen, there is a symbolic,

00:03:36.960 there's a violation of these parishioners

00:03:39.860 and these pastors' rights, yes.

00:03:42.520 But she said there's also a symbolic attack

00:03:45.100 on the fabric of a liberal democratic society

00:03:48.160 when the government is locking church doors.

00:03:51.480 And an interesting point I have to raise here.

00:03:54.800 A lot of people, in fact, a lot of Christians,

00:03:57.120 emailed me after my previous show this week

00:03:59.500 and said, well, hang on, my church is on Zoom.

00:04:01.740 Why can't this church meet on Zoom?

00:04:03.180 My church is doing streaming on YouTube and Facebook.

00:04:05.960 Why can't this church?

00:04:06.960 And there's been a lot of dispute within Christianity,

00:04:10.340 within Christian denominations and individual churches

00:04:12.900 about this very question.

00:04:14.980 As I said, my church has gone virtual.

00:04:17.860 The only people in the building

00:04:19.320 when the restrictions are capped at, I think, 10,

00:04:21.480 are the people that are responsible

00:04:23.140 for being on the stream.

00:04:24.980 So the band, the pastor, the videographer,

00:04:27.600 and so on and so forth.

00:04:29.440 And the reason I bring that up is to say this.

00:04:32.120 Churches can decide to do that.

00:04:33.900 The whole point of valuing individual liberty

00:04:36.380 is that you value one's right to set their own boundaries,

00:04:41.400 to say, listen, you know what?

00:04:42.420 We don't want to open up,

00:04:44.100 or we want to open up with restrictions,

00:04:45.820 or we want to reduce capacity,

00:04:47.200 or we want to do all of these things.

00:04:49.020 That's what choice is about.

00:04:52.220 So allowing Trinity Bible Chapel,

00:04:54.500 or Grace Life Church, or any other church to open

00:04:57.160 does not force anyone to open.

00:05:00.200 It doesn't force anyone to do anything.

00:05:02.900 The question comes down to this.

00:05:05.180 Who gets to decide?

00:05:07.420 Should individual churches get to decide?

00:05:09.760 What is an essential form of worship?

00:05:12.300 Or should the government get to decide?

00:05:15.760 And the fact that the government has said

00:05:17.480 you can have a wedding, you can have a funeral,

00:05:19.180 means that they understand there is a part of religious practice

00:05:22.460 that cannot take place in a virtual forum,

00:05:25.880 or not exclusively in a virtual forum.

00:05:27.720 So the government recognizes that some practices of faith

00:05:30.880 must be done in person.

00:05:32.660 At that point, it's just a question of degrees.

00:05:36.160 And if the government concedes that certain things cannot be replicated,

00:05:39.860 that is not a situation in which there is a valid substitute to worship

00:05:44.480 for some denominations or for some churches

00:05:47.060 that can take place online if church doors are shut down.

00:05:51.060 And by the way, I say shut down.

00:05:52.640 If you're talking about a restriction at 10 people or 15 people,

00:05:56.580 a hard cap, it's basically a shutdown.

00:05:59.600 You're not dealing with capacity.

00:06:01.500 You're dealing with a church that could be the size of three Costco's

00:06:04.280 that can have 10 people,

00:06:05.180 or a church that's the size of, you know,

00:06:07.560 a little cubicle at Tim Hortons can have,

00:06:09.840 not cubicle, they don't have cubicles at Tim Hortons.

00:06:11.720 Maybe in the remote work era they do.

00:06:13.620 What's the word I'm looking for?

00:06:14.660 Booth, vestibule, whatever.

00:06:16.400 A church that's that size can also have 10 people

00:06:19.260 just crammed into it like a clown car.

00:06:20.920 So any of these hard numbers

00:06:22.620 that do not reflect the size of the building

00:06:25.060 are completely arbitrary.

00:06:27.440 They absolutely are made up

00:06:29.200 and scratched on the back of a napkin

00:06:31.160 and passed off as good policy.

00:06:33.500 And this is the problem.

00:06:35.580 On one hand, we have government saying,

00:06:37.100 listen to the experts, follow the science.

00:06:39.180 And on the other hand,

00:06:40.400 no science to be found on a lot of these things.

00:06:43.880 And I spoke with also from the JCCF,

00:06:46.640 James Kitchen, a lawyer who's been very good

00:06:48.980 on fighting a lot of these lockdown tickets

00:06:50.660 a couple of months ago.

00:06:52.060 And James was saying that eventually

00:06:54.180 the government is going to have to pony up

00:06:56.340 its evidence, if any exists,

00:06:58.160 that says masks work,

00:07:00.120 that says lockdowns work,

00:07:01.520 that says all of these restrictions

00:07:03.280 are valid.

00:07:04.120 Eventually, they're going to have

00:07:05.160 to show their science.

00:07:06.920 And I think it'll be interesting

00:07:08.420 to look at the date stamp on that.

00:07:10.820 One thing I know from going through

00:07:12.540 my own battle against the federal government

00:07:15.360 over the Leaders Debates Commission

00:07:16.660 is that the dates on documents

00:07:18.580 are very revealing in some cases

00:07:20.300 because we found that the Debates Commission

00:07:22.100 had a policy that effectively prohibited us

00:07:25.800 from attending the debate.

00:07:27.020 But the policy came out the same day

00:07:29.740 that they made the decision to prohibit us.

00:07:32.320 So they actually wrote a policy

00:07:33.740 around a decision they had already made.

00:07:36.500 And I bet a lot of the so-called science

00:07:38.840 that's backing up some of these restrictions

00:07:41.100 is actually going to have come out

00:07:43.760 after the restrictions were determined

00:07:45.560 and after we're being told

00:07:47.120 that we have to follow the science.

00:07:48.660 And I bet that is going to happen,

00:07:50.780 that a lot of the science

00:07:51.800 is going to be retroactively applied

00:07:53.940 to the restrictions the government

00:07:55.880 wants to justify.

00:07:57.100 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:07:59.200 Support the program by donating to True North

00:08:01.520 at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - May 10, 2021

Court indefinitely extends lockout of Trinity Bible Chapel

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