Legal victories for Fight The Fines | Sheila Gunn Reid joins Ezra Levant

Start your free trial

Access exclusive members only RebelNews+ shows, event footage, and documentaries

Subscribe

Rebel News has never had an undertaking as large as our massive civil liberties campaign Fight The Fines. There's more than one hundred videos on our website, www.FightTheFines.com. Behind the scenes though, there are more than 1,200 Canadians — plus a small, but significant number of Brits and Australians, too — who are working with our lawyers to fight draconian charges for doing normal, every-day things.

On yesterday's edition of The Ezra Levant Show, Chief Reporter Sheila Gunn Reid joined Ezra to discuss some of the successes that Fight The Fines has achieved for Canadians.

Speaking about the case of the Full Gospel Outreach Centre in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Sheila told about the tough times the church was going through, the mayor who seemingly harboured a grudge against the church and the eventual success achieved by fighting the fine:

[Pastor Vern Temple] is really helping the people who are, sort of, forgotten by society. And he received a $14,000 lockdown ticket, at the time, like you said, the highest fine in the country.

Now, we've seen fines in the neighbourhood of $100,000 to some churches. But this was money that would be taken out of Pastor Vern's outreach to people who truly need it. This is not a rich church — I went there, I visited. I've been to northern Iraq, I've seen bombed out churches. The scale of the poverty of the people Pastor Vern works with, it's comparable.

The church had recently experienced a flood, they were trying to round up donations to deal with that and along comes a very vindictive mayor in Prince Albert, who seems to have a bit of a grudge against Pastor Vern because he ministers to homeless and drug addicted people. The mayor saw his church as a blackhole where criminality happens — as opposed to, it happens to be in a place where people need the church...

We lawyered him [Pastor Vern] up, we got Sarah [Miller] involved. She's worked very, very hard for six, seven, eight months now already, and she was able to have that $14,000 ticket kicked out for Vern Temple and the Full Gospel Outreach Centre — and you know, I couldn't be happier. 

For the full interview discussing the success of FightTheFines.com, and the full episode of The Ezra Levant Show, become a SUBSCRIBER to RebelNews+ today.