by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) - Canadian pastor Artur Pawlowski has been released after spending 51 days in jail on charges of inciting “mischief” while preparing to hold a service in Alberta for Freedom Convoy activists protesting US-Canada border Covid-19 restrictions on February 8, CBN reports. The pastor is reported to have been in solitary confinement during his incarceration.
The pastor of Street Church and the Cave of Adallum in Calgary, Alberta, Pawlowski has been arrested several times for breaching and protesting Canada’s COVID-19 regulations. He gained notoriety in 2021 for calling health inspectors and law enforcement officials “Nazis” and “Gestapo” when they came to investigate why his church was violating pandemic rules by gathering in person.
Pawlowski was freed on bail on Wednesday; he had also been charged with “breaching an order to keep the peace.” A lower court had rejected his application for bail but the Court of Queen’s Bench granted it on the conditions of paying $25,000, plus $12,000 surety from his wife and son. In addition, he has to be home from 7pm to 7am except when he is attending church.
In a statement to the Christian Post about the reasons for Pawlowski’s original arrest at the Convoy blockade, supporter Ezra Levant said: “Calgary police literally arrest[ed] a Christian pastor who was planning on speaking to a peaceful protest…This was clearly an attempt to stop him from expressing himself politically to these truckers.”
According to Levant, Pawlowski’s latest arrest and his incarceration exemplify an “authoritarian Canada that’s verging on a police state.”