Canadian pastor jailed for holding church during COVID welcomes pardon, blasts Trudeau

A clergyman from Alberta, Canada, who was repeatedly imprisoned after not closing his church praised a plan from the province's new premier to pardon and compensate those arrested and fined over COVID-19 protocols.

"It's a step in the right direction, but I would like to see it being done," Pastor Artur Pawlowski told Fox News Digital in a phone interview.

Pawlowski, who is now running for political office after becoming leader of the Alberta Independence Party in September, has endured multiple dramatic arrests during the pandemic, including once in the middle of a busy Calgary highway on his way home from church and again on the tarmac of the Calgary International Airport after a speaking tour in the U.S.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who was sworn in on Oct. 11, is the first Canadian leader to apologize for discrimination against the unvaccinated in Canada, which has seen some of the strictest COVID-19 mandates in the world.

Earlier this year, Pawlowski spent 51 days in jail after being arrested following a speech to truckers who were blocking the U.S. border crossing in Coutts, Alberta, in protest of Canada's vaccine mandate. The pastor told Fox News Digital after he was released that he was abused and humiliated by prison authorities, and that some guards tried to convince other inmates to hurt him, but that they refused.

Many of the charges against Pawlowski were dropped in June upon his appeal, but he still has outstanding fines totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars for keeping his church open and feeding the homeless in defiance of the government.

Pawlowski, who worries that Canadians have become complacent about what he says is growing tyranny in the country, said he never would have come to Canada after growing up under communism in Poland if he had known what he would have been facing.

"You're not allowed to question governments, you're not allowed to question the mainstream media, just like during my childhood when I was growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Poland under the boots of the Soviets," he said

https://www.foxnews.com/world/pastor-running-office-welcomes-plan-pardon-covid-offenders-being-jailed-keeping-church-open

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