Grace Life Church in Alberta faced a paramilitary-style occupation—fenced, tarp-covered, guarded by mall cops and police—while its pastor was jailed for 35 days without family visits, the only religious leader globally treated this way under Premier Jason Kenney’s UCP. Contrast this with secular businesses like Walmart operating at full capacity; even Jewish and Muslim leaders urged the church to close, exposing a chilling lack of solidarity. Spencer Fernando warns of a unified institutional push against dissent, from lockdowns to silencing journalists, eroding Canada’s freedoms under the guise of public health, revealing conservatives’ surprising embrace of state over individual rights. [Automatically generated summary]
I want to give you some philosophical thoughts on the paramilitary occupation of the Grace Life Church outside of Edmonton.
It really is shocking when you think of it.
Occupying a church, setting up a paramilitary garrison there.
It really is the kind of thing you would see in a place like China or North Korea.
I'll tell you about the Canadian reaction to it, though.
Let me invite you to become a subscriber first to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
I want to show you some footage.
I want to show you some of what we call B-roll of what they've done to the church.
And of course, you can only see that if you get the video version.
You'll understand it on the audio podcast, but if you get the video, you'll see this visual story.
And it's eight bucks a month to get the visual version of this podcast.
And you also get access to other shows by Devin Menzies and Sheila Gunread and Andrew Chapados.
And you'll also get the satisfaction of knowing that you're supporting really one of the few media companies in Canada that are independent and they care about religious freedom.
So please go to RebelNews.com and click subscribe.
It's just $8 a month, by the way.
All right, thanks.
here's today's podcast.
Defending Church Freedom00:15:35
Tonight, government troops have occupied a church in Alberta.
Where's the outcry?
Even from other churches.
It's April 8th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is the government will watch a publisher is because it's my bloody right to do so.
It's been more than a day now, and the Alberta government has solidified its physical occupation of the Grace Life Church outside Edmonton.
They've built a fence around it.
They put a tarp up to block people from seeing what they're actually doing.
They've hired Renta Cop mall cops.
There are real cops who have been there too.
And they brought in portable toilets to the site.
Just stop for a second.
The government has physically taken over a church, evicted its pastor and all its congregants, has occupied it with guns, and just to show what they think of any sacredness of the place, they've brought toilets.
They've moved in toilets to the church as if their metaphor needed to be any more obvious.
Of course, this is the same government that threw this same church's pastor in prison for 35 days, maximum security prison, no visits from his wife and kids.
Say, when he was in prison, the only religious leader that I know of who is imprisoned anywhere in the free world, and to think it was happening in Canada, and to think it was happening in Alberta, and to think it was happening under a conservative provincial government, and to think the premier of that conservative provincial government is Jason Kenney.
Atrocious, unthinkable, and yet there it is.
But of course, you wouldn't hear criticism of that from Kenny's own MLAs.
They care more about their party loyalty than they do about principles.
Most politicians are that way, I guess.
And of course, you wouldn't hear criticism of the pastor in prison from the media party.
They love the lockdowns, and they generally don't like Christians much.
But where were the other religious leaders, other Christians of any denomination?
Where was anyone, really?
I didn't see it.
Maybe I missed it.
In fact, I've seen this really, really gross article.
A Jewish rabbi and a Muslim imam told the church to shut down.
Yeah, thanks for the solidarity, you government shills.
I have enough friends who grew up in the former Soviet Union and who told me what it was like back there.
One Jewish friend of mine told me that the synagogue in his city was only allowed to open by the authorities if the rabbi at that synagogue agreed to really be a KGB agent to tell them who came to the synagogue.
They said otherwise they would close it down.
So he was given a choice.
Be a KGB informant on anyone who comes to the synagogue or no synagogue allowed.
How gross is that?
It was a snitch culture, a zero-trust society.
I honestly don't know what the right ethical decision there would have been, but that was the Soviet Union.
We're not quite there yet here in Canada, but you have religious leaders volunteering to line up to speak for the government to denounce the dissident church.
How dare they operate?
I think it's extra gross that they were Jewish and Muslim groups telling Christians how to run their church.
Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot.
But again, I didn't exactly see a lineup of Christian leaders defending the church, did you?
So gross.
The only churches that are allowed to be open and full are the cathedrals of commerce, the shopping malls, the Walmarts, the Costco's, the liquor stores, the marijuana stores, you know, the important stuff, not like mere churches.
But my point is, that 35-day imprisonment of the pastor was a trial run, wasn't it?
It was a test.
In 35 days, the government saw what it could get away with, and the answer is everything.
And so, of course, they went in military style, literally occupying the church, turning it into an armed outpost, and they brought their toilets with them just to show the level of respect with which they treat the church.
So gross.
And nothing.
Did you see anything?
I saw a statement yesterday by 15 government LAs, government MLAs and Kenny's party saying they're opposed to the new increased lockdown that he imposed on the province this week.
Okay, thanks for that.
But not a mention of the church or religious freedoms, either the pastor's imprisonment or the military-style occupation.
Why not a mention of that?
And more to the point, so they put out a Facebook post.
Great.
Let me give you a medal for bravery.
Are you actually going to do anything, though, or are you just sort of Facebook guys?
Are you going to submit a private member's bill?
Are you going to call for an emergency debate?
Are you going to vote against something, anything?
Are you going to break away from the government and form your own freedom caucus?
I don't know.
Are you going to stand, and I mean physically stand, with, if not the church, one of the thousand small businesses being knifed in the back?
Or is this just slacktivism?
Do you know that word?
You did a tweet, you clicked like on Facebook.
Now you can claim that you're more than nothing.
Yeah, no, that's a placebo, a fake medicine that fools you into thinking you took real medicine.
I see today that an MLA recorded a video about the church.
Wow, I'll play it for you now in full.
I woke up this morning and saw the same thing everyone else did, that a church outside Edmonton has been barricaded by AHS.
Now, I think in a free and democratic society, worship is fundamental freedom that we must maintain.
I believe that as Canadians, as Albertans, it is so intrinsic to who we are, whether you're a believer or not.
The ability to choose for yourself who you worship, how you worship, and where you worship.
Now, I respect and understand the 15% capacity limit.
I'm frustrated by it.
I brought it up in the legislature multiple times that we should be lifting these numbers.
But that said, it is a different line to cross, to barricade a church, a place of God.
I'm not speaking here as a politician.
I'm speaking as an Albertan and as a Christian.
And I believe that right now, fundamentally, we need to take a stand.
We need to say something.
And here I am making the case that we cannot allow churches to be barricaded in our society.
If you agree with this, I'm asking you to share this video.
I'm asking you to please let others know that we cannot stand by and let churches and places of worship be treated in this manner by AHS or any other government body.
That's just my opinion.
Thank you.
Great.
I'm glad he did it.
He's literally the only MLA in Alberta I have seen who spoke out for the church.
Sort of, that is.
Did he call for the troops to leave there?
Where was he when the pastor was jailed?
Why is he recording the video at the legislature?
Why didn't he just drive 15 minutes down to the church property itself?
I'm not saying break into the church property, stand on the road, why not?
And what was the or else part?
What was his plan?
Or is the plan just to do a little video, except lots of kudos for being very, very brave and edgy, and then going back to sleep?
Hey, can I ask you a question?
Can you name a single way in which the so-called Conservative Party's treatment of this church is any different from how the NDP would have treated it were they in office?
Prison for the pastor, armed occupation of the physical building, toilets.
Seriously, other than dynamiting the church as the Taliban would do, what more could the NDP do that the Tories aren't doing?
In fact, it would probably be better if the NDP were in power now.
They would do what the UCP is doing, but at least then you'd find a few more so-called conservative MLAs in opposition feeling free to speak out against the lockdown and maybe even pretending to care about a church.
They're all awful, aren't they?
And they're all the same.
Stay with us for now.
Welcome back.
Well, sometimes here at Rebel News, we feel like we're so in the weeds on stories that it's worth it to pull the camera back, as they say, to take a big picture view to see what's going on.
And I think this article by Spencer Fernando does that job in a good manner, in a terrifying manner.
The headline is, Canada no longer feels like a free country.
And you can see this at spencerfernando.com.
And Spencer gives four recent developments in Canada that do, each one of them are troubling, but when you put them all together, you start to worry, are we losing our freedom?
Police raiding the Grace Life Church in Alberta, the stay-at-home lockdown order in Ontario, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court saying we have to take down, quote, hurtful words from the internet, and our own reporter in Montreal, Yankee Pollock, being repeatedly stopped and fined on the street just for doing journalism, even though he has an exemption.
Joining us now via Skype from Winnipeg is Spencer Fernando, article author of this article.
Spencer, great to see you.
You know what?
Each one of these stories we're familiar with here at Rebel News, one of them, in fact, impacts our own reporter.
But when you look at them all together, and this is just one week's news, this is a terrifying trend.
Yeah, it's quite concerning.
And I think the thing that disturbs me the most is to see how many people cheer this on.
I mean, you go on Twitter and you see people saying, oh, yeah, we need a full military lockdown.
When they see, you know, the church being shut down, this is great.
Punish them.
There's a lot of people cheering this on.
And so I think it's easy for us to just say, oh, the politicians, you know, they're corrupt or they're not listening to people.
But, you know, there are a lot of people who agree with them and who are pushing them to do this.
And I think that's kind of the deeper issue: how have we become a country where this is acceptable?
You know, I have a friend in Australia who asked me how any of this Grace Life Church stuff was possible.
And I tried to answer for an Australian.
It would be like if someone came down from Mars, let's say, and said, well, how do you explain this?
And my attempt to explain it to her was that normally you have different institutions in the establishment that sort of are a bit of a check and balance on each other.
You have the government, but you have the opposition.
You have the media.
You have law professors and law courts.
You have NGOs.
Like you have all these different sources of power.
But on these issues that you list, all these sources of power are working in harmony.
They all agree.
There's no major source of power in our democracy that's worried about lockdowns, that is worried about free speech, that's worried about heavy-handed policing, that's worried about churches being shut down.
There's just no other power source.
They're all in on this together.
It's a terrifying feeling.
Yeah, I mean, look at the way much of the establishment media has covered all this.
They basically go out and they look for, you know, violators, people who are breaking the so-called rules.
And then they try to go after those people.
So they should be going after the government.
They should be saying, you know, what are you basing these rules on?
Do your numbers line up?
You know, why?
Good example is Ontario.
Why do you keep going back into lockdowns when Toronto's had one of the strictest lockdowns in North America, if not the strictest, and it's still not working, obviously?
Why do you keep doing the same thing over and over again?
But instead, it's just, no, we'll just try to ostracize and make an example out of anyone who doesn't follow the rules.
And so that the adversarial nature of the media is being fully abandoned.
Yeah.
You know, police brutality, to be honest with you, very, very candid here, it's not something I really paid attention to in my life.
And I'll be honest, I probably wouldn't have cared about it.
And if I had heard about it, I would have, in the back of my mind, thought, well, there must be another side of the story.
Police don't really do that.
But over the past year, I've seen so many videos of police, I'm going to call it brutality, very heavy-handed approaches to people who do trivial things like not wearing a mask or whatever.
And then I see the police physically manhandling our own people.
So perhaps I'm criticizing myself for not caring more in the past, Spencer.
But I now say, well, where are all the liberals and the leftists who used to be, you know, hair trigger calling out police brutality?
They seem to be cheering police brutality.
It's a weird dichotomy.
I mean, the police have never been more under scrutiny if it deals with, let's say, Black Lives Matter.
Like there, police are terrified to do anything, but against, you know, this Grace Life Church or reporters or people not wearing masks, it's open season.
And forget about the police for a second, but where's the ACLU types?
Where are the civil liberty types?
Where's the rein in the police types?
That's what's so confusing.
The left used to care about these things.
Yeah, it's a good point.
I think it's a good point to mention that, you know, the right has often not been, and I include myself in this as well, not been good on those issues, you know, kind of like you mentioned, your own kind of thought process.
And, you know, I tweeted a while back and actually got a surprisingly good response.
I said, I think a lot of people on the right are maybe now understanding how indigenous people have felt, you know, by heavy-handed government action, the government telling them how to live and what to do and kind of imposing on them.
And so I think there is a bit of a, maybe you could say, convergence of viewpoints on some of those issues.
But I think one of the issues is that, you know, the kind of the values of our society are starting to fade away.
What I mean by that is the commitment to defending people's freedom.
And the idea that you defend freedom for people, regardless of whether you agree with, right?
It's not like, oh, I'm just going to defend freedom for people I agree with.
I'm defending the concept of freedom.
So if it's an Indigenous person or a black person being mistreated by police, then that's wrong.
If it's an anti-lockdown group or anti-mask group, whether you agree with them or not, if they're getting mistreated by police, or if it's just regular people just trying to go about their lives.
and journalists getting mistreated by police, all of that is supposed to be wrong.
It's not about agreeing with the ideology of any one group, but believing that people should be free and should be respected.
And so I think that's the bigger issue.
And a lot of these groups, I think, they feel politicians have basically said, these are the kinds of people you can target.
You can go after conservatives.
You can go after people who oppose lockdowns and oppose government restrictions.
They're kind of an easy target.
And I think some police, of course, not all.
There are many great police officers, but some kind of take that as a cue and say, well, I guess we don't have to treat this group quite as well.
And we can get away with it because no one's going to hold us accountable.
Yeah, you know what?
I think about, for example, the Grayslave Church, which is just incredible.
The police occupation.
And it's a 24-7 thing.
They brought in the porta parties.
They're not leaving.
Political Targets and Accountability00:02:03
And I think, imagine if that were done to a mosque.
Now, there have been mosques in Canada that have been credibly accused of being hotbeds for Islamic terrorism.
For example, the Asuna Wahhabi Mosque in Montreal, the Pentagon said that was a serious recruiting place for ISIS and al-Qaeda.
So there are some religious, and there are some Sikh temples that are affiliated with extremism.
The idea that you would occupy a mosque, set up a 24-hour police occupation of it, wall it off and ban worshipers.
If that were done to one of these mosques or Sikh temples that I just referred to, you could only imagine the civil liberties, the legal, the judicial, the human rights response.
But just because, you know, folks go to church in the same numbers they go to Walmart, it's a shocking thing.
But the biggest shock is that how many church leaders have you seen in Canada in the last 24 hours speak up?
Where's the head of the Catholic Church?
Where are the senior bishops?
Where's the cardinal?
Where's other evangelical leaders?
Where are Jewish leaders?
Where are Muslim and Sikh and Hindu leaders?
But mainly where are the Christians?
I see silence.
Yeah, there's a lot of people who seem too afraid to say anything at all.
And it's quite sad to see.
It kind of comes back to the point I made, right?
People, they only want to defend freedom for their own group, or even in some cases, not their own group.
So many people, I think, have shown themselves that they'll just listen to what any politician or public health official tells them.
They're not going to question anything.
And questioning those in power is supposed to be a bedrock of a democratic country, which Canada is supposed to be.
And that really seems to be fading away for a lot of people.
They're afraid and they're just going to let fear totally take them over and dominate what they do.
Silence On Lockdowns00:05:27
But I think the other issue is identity politics, right?
And this is why identity politics is really not compatible with a free and democratic country.
And the reason is you have to treat everyone equally under the law, right?
That's supposed to be the idea.
So as you say, there's certainly political correctness in all of this.
And we saw that early on when they were saying everyone stay inside, don't gather at all.
And then there were some Black Lives Matter protests.
And they said, oh, you saw even public health officials say things like, oh, racism is just as big a threat as the virus.
So wait a minute.
You've been telling everyone to stay home, stay away from their families, let businesses be absolutely wiped out.
But now this one protest is okay because you happen to agree with it.
You're obviously not following the science.
And I think that's kind of been the response for a long time.
Yeah.
Well, I think that there's a conservative case, a liberal case, a public health case against the lockdowns.
I think there are reasonable, you know, it's a spectrum of remedies and steps you can take.
Around the world, different places have taken different steps.
Some very poor countries really have done nothing, by the way.
And I don't know how strong a correlation there is between lockdowns and health outcomes.
Here's a chart I have shown before.
This is North Dakota and South Dakota.
North Dakota had a bit of a lockdown.
South Dakota, in many ways, was the least locked down state in the Union.
As you can see, absolutely identical infection rates.
Like it's as if I'm showing you the same graph twice.
I guess what I'm saying is there's more than one approach.
But why is it, Spencer, that in 10 provinces, three territories in the federal government, I can't name one official opposition party, one conservative party that's taking sort of the South Dakota approach, the Texas approach, the Florida approach, even though the governors of those three states are very popular.
Why are Canadian conservative establishment types not expressing a dissident point of view?
Yeah, I think we're finding out that the Canadian conservative establishment is a lot more statist and pro-government than they lead their donors and members and supporters to believe.
You know, they campaign limited government, you know, individual freedom.
We're going to get the government off your back.
You know, the government shouldn't be doing that much.
But we've seen them basically all respond in the same way during this crisis, which is the government's going to tell you when you can and can't open your business.
It's going to tell you where to go.
It's going to use state power to punish you if you violate the rules.
The rules are going to be draconian.
We're going to demonize anyone who disagrees.
And so, yeah, I think a lot of people are finding out that we thought we were electing some conservative type people, but we really elected just status who just happen to be putting the conservative label on their party for votes and donations.
So there's going to be obviously a reckoning, I think, within a lot of conservative parties as to what direction they go.
Maybe some will choose to keep going the status route, but I would hope that at least some choose to go the limited government pro-individual freedom route because even if you totally disagree with that personally, you should want a democratic country to have a wide spectrum of views and an actual debate in terms of values and what the country is supposed to stand for and how the country should be governed.
And right now, there really isn't much of it.
It's just people slapping a different label on the same policies and pretending that they're different.
I think you're right.
And I think it's terrifying.
Spencer, it's great to catch up with you.
Just one more time for viewers.
The article is called Canada No Longer Feels Like a Free Country.
We've been speaking with Spencer Fernando.
I encourage you to go to spencerfernando.com, sign up for his emails, which I have done, and feel free to chip in a few bucks because like Rebel News, he does not take money from Justin Trudeau.
And I believe that's why he can be the independent and thoughtful man that he is.
Spencer, great to have you with us.
Thanks for your time.
You're welcome.
Take care.
You too.
All right.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
On my show last night, David writes, so they have me meeting every Sunday.
Shouldn't they all be in hospital dying from the virus?
Yeah, that's a great point.
I mean, look, I have studied the statistics in every single province in this country.
And it's like a bad flu season.
It's about double or triple the annual flu death toll, and that's not good.
No one likes to die from any cause, but it is an average age of 81 or 82.
No young people die from this, and the risk for anyone under 60 is minimal.
So why are we locking down young people?
Why are we canceling schools and restaurants that are places of young people?
Why are we doing this?
There's no science behind it.
Wendy writes, less than 30 COVID-related deaths per day since early March in Canada.
We're still having crippling lockdowns, dehumanizing mask obedience, and absurd charades like the RCMP closing off Grace Life Church.
Whoever thought this health emergency actually had anything to do with our health?
I see no correlation.
Well, as I pointed out to Spencer, you have a very good experiment comparing the two Dakotas, North Dakota, South Dakota.
Enjoying the Lockdown Crisis00:01:12
They're near each other.
They're adjacent, similar in size, similar demographically.
There's a lot of great similarities between those two states.
One locked down, the other didn't, and the results are identical.
Doesn't that tell you what you need to know?
Bruce writes, my MLA, who used to be a personal friend, won't reply to my emails to his provincial office.
Guess who isn't going to get my vote in the next election?
Jason Kenney has been infected by the deep state.
Yeah, I really don't get it.
I just don't get it.
He literally was the most pro-religious freedom politician in the country a decade ago.
And he used to run the Taxpayers Federation two decades ago.
So how did he become a creature of the bureaucratic deep state, the public health deep state, the authoritarian deep state, the anti-Christian deep state?
I do not know that.
But they must be laughing at him.
They're enjoying the lockdown and they're enjoying crushing the church, but imagine the extra glee they have that they're using Jason Kenney as the front man to do him.
Destroying not just the church, but destroying Jason Kenney's reputation in the meantime.