Western Standard - August 31, 2023


Northcott's ＂No more Lockdowns＂ rodeo case dropped after pandemic orders deemed invalid...

Mentioned
Hildebrandt Kenny Nigel
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Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

188.92

Word count

978

Sentence count

64

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Pastor Kenney Hildebrand was one of the most controversial men in Canada. He was the head of the Ontario Conference of Canadian Pastors, and one of Canada s most controversial ministers, when he shut down churches and bars across the province to enforce a law that he believed was necessary to maintain public safety.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Do you believe in God? Well, that's not central to who you are. Shut your church. You don't need to go to church.
00:00:05.480 Like, where's that mentality come from?
00:00:07.280 It is surprising that it came from Kenny, because I don't think his faith is a hobby to him.
00:00:11.640 I think he does take it very seriously. I think it is central to who he is.
00:00:15.200 Absolutely.
00:00:16.380 He, I guess, either, you know, we talk about this a lot at the time what was happened.
00:00:20.880 And he either believed, I think seriously, that he had to do this because it was such an emergency that we had to shut down these churches.
00:00:30.800 We had to barricade these rebels.
00:00:33.000 We had to arrest these pastors because they were such a threat to public safety and possibly to government authority.
00:00:40.220 Or on the other side, the politician got the better of him and he saw it as good politics.
00:00:46.820 That maybe arresting these pastors would win him support with centrist voters who are maybe a bit more deferential to the authority of the state to impose these kinds of measures.
00:00:59.500 I don't think Kenny ever saw it as a church as a hobby.
00:01:04.240 I don't think he saw it that way.
00:01:06.360 But either he probably believed in his heart that it was so important that we had to jail these pastors.
00:01:11.000 We had to shut down these churches to preserve public health and public order.
00:01:14.640 Or it was just good politics, he thought.
00:01:17.980 To be exquisitely precise, I think it was Alberta Health who actually moved in on...
00:01:22.020 On the orders of the Alberta government, though.
00:01:23.700 They were doing this under the authority of decisions made by the cabinet.
00:01:28.240 And that's what the Ingram decision came down to, is the decisions were ordered by the cabinet and not by Henshaw.
00:01:34.280 The thing is, you couldn't go to church, but you could go to a restaurant.
00:01:38.080 By the way, around in B.C., by the way, they closed the restaurants down.
00:01:45.600 But I mean, when you look for consistency and logic in all of this mess, it's so hard to find it.
00:01:52.820 How could that be a consistent policy that's fine, this is not?
00:01:56.520 And I thought that, you know, I mean, I was a strong supporter of Kenny when he was on his way in and up.
00:02:01.360 And I'd always heard of him as being a strong supporter outside of the faith aspect of civil liberties.
00:02:05.840 I mean, you don't get much more faithless than I.
00:02:07.280 And I strongly understand the incredible importance, though, of the preservation of the right to practice and gather to take part in your religion.
00:02:17.360 It's an absolute right that must be protected, violated only at the most extreme of last resorts.
00:02:23.840 And so I was just as horrified watching them fence in a church and keeping people away from their social gathering and their faith as anybody should be.
00:02:34.340 I mean, COVID turned everything upside down.
00:02:36.620 It really did.
00:02:37.940 I think you hit on a really strong point, Nigel, that I think a lot of non-churchgoers view it as going to, like, your bridge club.
00:02:48.360 Maybe they know it's a little more serious than going to a bridge club.
00:02:51.260 But, I mean, you can wait.
00:02:53.780 You don't really need to do it, you know.
00:02:56.640 We're working from home now.
00:02:58.680 You can wait.
00:02:59.680 The importance of a central social place, though, somebody talked about a bit in the past.
00:03:03.740 As a bar owner, I don't want to fully compare, you know, going to the bar to going to church, but it's true. 1.00
00:03:08.060 Everybody has their social structures that are very important to them, their gatherings weekly, daily, and so on.
00:03:13.760 And I saw the suffering of my regular bar goers used to come to our bar.
00:03:17.720 There was nothing else for them.
00:03:18.840 When they were locked out of the bar, they had nowhere else to go.
00:03:21.740 And I can't relate the specifics.
00:03:23.120 There's a couple of fellows.
00:03:24.580 They really succumbed to alcoholism because, I mean, whereas they'd have one or two at the bar, now that they had no outlet, stayed in their homes and just drank themselves out.
00:03:33.500 Like, it's important to people to have their social gathering, the people with them, whether it's through faith or through all these other outlets.
00:03:41.860 His bar that he owned in Prittis was effectively the local church.
00:03:46.480 Well, to some people in a sense, I'm just meaning it's people underestimate the damage done when you shut people away from their social outlets.
00:03:53.820 We won't get into it, but also of note, Pastor Hildebrandt in Ontario.
00:04:00.020 Now, they didn't have the Ingram decision there that just nullified everything because it's Ontario, so different.
00:04:07.700 But he, the government dropped all charges but one, and he ended up pleading guilty to one, ended up paying a big fine.
00:04:16.960 But he got most things let off on it, and he was a very strong refusenik there as well.
00:04:21.340 But, unfortunately, there's going to be less justice done in Ontario than in Alberta because here our government was dumb enough to not follow its own rules and who actually signs off on the orders.
00:04:32.180 So, we've talked about this previously with, like, you know, the new heritage minister.
00:04:39.700 Pebble Rodriguez was, no, no, no, no, no, on public safety.
00:04:43.060 Where I kind of like, when you have a bad government, I kind of prefer them to be incompetent than smart because you can get a, they're less effective in oppressing you when they're incompetent.
00:04:54.400 And Alberta's government was incompetent enough that they didn't do the paperwork right, which nullified all their own mandates post facto.
00:05:02.060 So, unfortunately, Ontario seems to have actually crossed the T's and dotted the I's a little more, and so less justice to be done for the refuseniks there.