Rabbi Moshe Stern and his wife Sarah had been fully vaccinated in Israel by the end of January 2021. Still Canadian citizens, they decided to travel back to Canada in the summer, as they often do, for a variety of reasons including attending their grandson's wedding.

At the time of the Sterns’ travel, Justin Trudeau's failed policy of forcing all travellers into quarantine hotel jails, regardless of their vaccination status, was still in place.

Rabbi Stern and his wife, however, should have been exempt from being locked away in what amounted to a hotel penitentiary, for both medical and religious reasons.

They arrived in Toronto with two doctors’ letters, from very well-regarded physicians, explaining as much. The letters provided were from one doctor in Toronto and one from Israel. The medical exemption letters explained that Rabbi Stern suffers from diabetes and his wife Sarah has hypertension and extreme anxiety, which would be exacerbated by confinement in a small quarantine hotel room.

And on top of that, there are religious problems too. The couple eats strictly kosher food, meaning they likely wouldn’t be able to eat the food that would be provided by the hotel. Quarantine hotels in Canada have been known to get dietary restrictions wrong. Rebel News' own David Menzies proved that when trying to help a man with a severe seafood allergy who was being served anchovies in a quarantine hotel.

(Menzies tried to deliver pizza to the man so he could eat something, but was denied by the authorities.)

So, what did Trudeau's border agents decide to do? Did they respect this rabbi and his wife's exemptions? Of course not — they issued the couple thousands of dollars in fines.

Sarah and Rabbi Stern have signed up with Rebel News’ Fight the Fines project to have a lawyer fight these outrageous tickets in court. If you want to pitch in to help crowdfund lawyers for Rabbi Stern and over 2,200 other Canadians who are being helped through Fight The Fines, then please click here to donate.