This section discusses the political and civic era, touching on COVID-19, the voices that emerged, the Truckers' Freedom Convoy, challenges faced by Canada's institutions, honoring veterans, and a practical call to action. 

A Season of Testing: The COVID-19 Years

Few events in recent Canadian history have tested the character of our institutions — and the faithfulness of our churches — as profoundly as the COVID-19 pandemic and the policies that surrounded it.

 

Whatever one believes about the origins or severity of the virus itself, what became undeniable over the course of 2020 to 2022 was this: Canadians discovered that the rights and freedoms they had taken for granted were more fragile than they had imagined. Gatherings were restricted. Churches were closed or capped. Travel was curtailed. Livelihoods were threatened. And those who raised questions — doctors, nurses, pastors, politicians, ordinary citizens — often found themselves marginalized, fined, or silenced.

 

The Apostle Peter wrote that judgment begins with the household of God (1 Peter 4:17). From that perspective, the pressures of the pandemic years can be understood not only as a political crisis but as a spiritual one — a season in which God allowed the true condition of the Canadian Church to be revealed. And what was revealed was often uncomfortable.

 

"For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God?" 1 Peter 4:17

 

Many churches closed their doors without a word of protest. Many Christians quietly complied with every directive, never pausing to ask whether God's commands — to gather together (Hebrews 10:25), to care for the sick and the elderly, to stand for the vulnerable — might sometimes require courage in the face of government pressure.

 

This is not to say that caution and care for one's neighbours were wrong. Loving your neighbour sometimes means making sacrifices. But the speed and completeness with which many churches surrendered their voice, their gatherings, and their public witness revealed something important: we had already, long before COVID, made our peace with irrelevance. The pandemic simply made it visible.

 

"The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not a privilege — it is Canada's supreme law, built on the recognition of the supremacy of God. It belongs to the people, not to Parliament."

 

At the same time, the pandemic years produced something beautiful: a remnant of faithful Canadians — pastors, doctors, lawyers, truckers, parents, and ordinary believers — who refused to be silent. They paid a price for their courage. Some lost their jobs, their reputations, or their freedom. But they demonstrated that the salt had not entirely lost its flavour, and that the light had not gone completely out.

 

Those Who Dared to Speak

History remembers the famous voices. But most of the people who stood up during this period were not famous at all. They were nurses who refused to stay quiet when they saw things that troubled them. Pastors who kept their church doors open, knowing they risked heavy fines. Parents who pulled their children from schools and fought lonely battles in courtrooms. Federal employees who accepted unpaid leave rather than violate their conscience.

 

Among the pastors who bore public witness at considerable personal cost were Artur Pawlowski, Tobias Tissen, Tim Stephens, Henry Hildebrandt, Peter Wall, and James Coates — men who understood that a shepherd does not abandon his flock when the pressure comes. Pastor Steven Michel of Crosspoint Baptist Church in Navan, Ontario, delivered services across fourteen consecutive hours on a single weekend when attendance was restricted to ten people, so that every one of his members could worship.

 

Politicians including Derek Sloan, Randy Hillier, Maxime Bernier, and Joel Lightbound raised their voices in legislatures and public squares, often at the cost of their careers. Legal organizations like the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms fought case after case in the courts. Medical professionals — at enormous professional risk — challenged the dominant narrative and called for open, honest scientific debate.

 

And there were thousands more whose names will never appear in any book. Christians who prayed daily for justice and righteous leaders. Families who quietly homeschooled their children rather than surrender them to an increasingly hostile curriculum. Elderly believers who refused the vaccine and accepted isolation rather than compromise their conscience. Truckers who drove across the country to say, simply: enough.

 

"And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment." Philippians 1:9

 

The Truckers' Freedom Convoy: A Glimmer of Hope

In the winter of 2022, something remarkable happened. Thousands of Canadians — truck drivers and their families, farmers, tradespeople, veterans, mothers and fathers and grandparents — converged on Ottawa from every corner of the country. They came to be heard. They came in peace. And for a few weeks, they gave many Canadians who had grown weary and discouraged a reason to hope.

 

The images from that convoy are ones that will not easily be forgotten: overpasses lined with cheering supporters, Canadian flags waving in the bitter cold, strangers sharing meals and prayers, people from every background united by a simple conviction that their government had gone too far.

 

The convoy was imperfect, as all human endeavours are. But it was genuine. It was peaceful. And it represented something that many Canadians had stopped believing was possible: ordinary people standing up, together, and saying that they valued their freedom more than their comfort.

 

"Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends." — John 15:13  Our veterans understood this. So did the truckers who risked everything to make their voices heard.

 

The government's response was deeply troubling. The Emergencies Act — a law designed for genuine national crises — was invoked for the first time in Canadian history against peaceful protesters. Bank accounts were frozen without court orders. Participants were labelled terrorists. The full weight of state power was brought to bear on Canadian citizens who had committed no violence and broken no serious law.

 

Whatever one's view of the specific policy disputes that motivated the convoy, Canadians of every background should be troubled by a government that responds to peaceful dissent with financial punishment and emergency powers. The freedom to protest, to petition, and to be heard is not a privilege granted by the state. It is a right — one that generations of Canadians fought and died to secure.

 

Among those who paid a personal price were Tamara Lich and Pat King — neither of whom committed acts of violence, yet both of whom experienced incarceration. Their stories serve as a reminder that the freedoms we take for granted are only as secure as our willingness to defend them.

 

"The nations have sunk down in the pit which they made; in the net which they hid, their own foot is caught." Psalm 9:15

 

Canada's Institutions Under Pressure

Canada's system of rights and freedoms was not built in a day, and it was not built without cost. The Canadian Bill of Rights of 1960 and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982 represent the accumulated wisdom of a civilization that had witnessed what happens when governments are allowed to operate without limits — and chose to build something better.

 

Central to that system is a simple but profound idea: the government does not grant rights. Rights are inherent to human beings, made in the image of God, and the role of government is to protect them, not to dispense or withhold them according to political convenience.

 

The COVID-19 years tested that principle severely. Courts ruled that significant restrictions on religious gatherings were justified as reasonable limits in a free and democratic society. Whatever one makes of those rulings, the broader pattern is worth examining honestly: the machinery of rights protection, when subjected to sustained political pressure, proved less robust than many Canadians had believed.

 

The lesson is not that our institutions are beyond repair. It is that institutions alone are never enough. Rights are only as real as the culture that defends them — and that culture is shaped, above all, by the convictions of its people. When Christians withdraw from public life, when churches stop speaking into the moral and political questions of the day, the vacuum does not stay empty. It fills with other voices, other values, other visions of what a good society looks like.

 

"The Constitution of Canada does not belong to Parliament or to the Legislatures; it belongs to the people." — Nova Scotia (A.G.) v. Canada (A.G.) [1951]

 

This is why the call to civic engagement is not a distraction from the gospel. It is an expression of it. Christians are called to love their neighbours — and loving your neighbour includes caring about the laws that govern his life, the schools that educate his children, and the freedoms that allow him to live according to his conscience.

 

The Compromise That Silenced the Church

There is one decision that the Canadian Church made — quietly, gradually, without ever quite realizing its full consequences — that has done more to diminish our public voice than almost anything else. It is the acceptance of charitable tax exemption status under the conditions set by the Canada Revenue Agency.

 

When a church registers as a charitable organization, it agrees to remain politically non-partisan. It agrees not to influence its members in partisan political matters, not to campaign for or against political parties, and not to speak from the pulpit in ways that could be construed as political advocacy. In exchange, it receives a tax exemption — a not insignificant financial benefit.

 

On the surface, this seems like a reasonable arrangement. Churches are not political parties. Pulpits should not become campaign platforms. These concerns are legitimate.

 

But the practical effect has been a Church that is afraid to speak about abortion, about parental rights, about the definition of marriage, about the content of school curricula — because any of these topics might be deemed "political" and jeopardize the tax exemption. And so, generation by generation, the Church has become quieter and quieter on the very questions that matter most to the families sitting in the pews.

 

"No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon." Luke 16:13

 

Jesus asked a pointed question: Are not our children worth more than a tax exemption? Is not freedom of conscience worth more than a financial arrangement with the government?

 

This is not a call for churches to become partisan political organizations. It is a call for churches to rediscover their prophetic voice — to speak the truth in love on the great moral questions of our time, without fear and without apology. The prophet's role was never to endorse political parties. It was to speak God's truth to power — to kings and rulers and ordinary people alike — and to call the nation back to righteousness.

 

The unions and professional associations of this country do not hesitate to advocate for their members on political questions. The Church of Jesus Christ, which carries the most important message in human history, should not be less courageous than a trade union.

 

Remember for Whom Our Veterans Fought

Every year on November 11th, Canada pauses for two minutes to honour those who gave their lives in service of this country. We stand in the cold, we bow our heads, we lay wreaths at cenotaphs from Newfoundland to British Columbia. And we say: we will not forget.

 

But what exactly do we remember? What was it, precisely, that those men and women fought for?

 

They fought for the next generation. They fought against tyranny — against the idea that the state has the right to tell its citizens what to think, what to say, where to go, and how to live. They fought for the freedom to worship, to raise families according to their own values, to speak the truth without fear of punishment. They fought for the freedom of conscience — the God-given right to live according to one's deepest convictions.

 

My father was a French Canadian who volunteered for the army before conscription in World War II — something unusual for a young single man with no obvious obligation to do so. He joined an English infantry unit and fought in Sicily. He came home physically uninjured, but carried the weight of what he had seen for the rest of his life. He died at fifty-five. He never spoke much about why he went. But watching him sit in silence through those war documentaries on television, I came to believe I understood: he went because it was the right thing to do.

 

"Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends." — John 15:13

 

We honour our veterans most truly not by placing flowers at a monument once a year, but by refusing to surrender — quietly, incrementally, without a fight — the freedoms they purchased at such tremendous cost. Not a single shot has been fired on Canadian soil in the battles of our generation. The erosion of our rights has happened through legislation, through regulation, through the slow cultural drift away from the values that once defined us.

 

The Christian believer, of all people, should understand what is at stake. We are not merely fighting for political freedoms, valuable as those are. We are fighting for the space to raise our children in the faith, to speak the truth of the gospel without legal threat, to live according to the convictions of our conscience before God. These are not negotiable. They are not privileges. They are the inheritance of every Canadian — and we have a responsibility to pass them on.

 

What Can We Do? Standing on Guard for Thee

It is easy, looking at the landscape of Canadian public life, to feel overwhelmed. The forces arrayed against Christian values in education, law, media, and culture are real and powerful. The pace of change has been rapid. And the Church — which should have been the voice of sanity and stability — has too often been absent.

 

So what do we do? Where do we begin?

 

We begin where every genuine movement of God has always begun: on our knees. Prayer is not a passive retreat from engagement. It is the foundation of it. Before Nehemiah lifted a single stone to rebuild Jerusalem's walls, he wept and prayed and fasted for days (Nehemiah 1:4). Before the early Church turned the Roman Empire upside down, they gathered in an upper room and prayed together for ten days. Prayer is not the last resort of the powerless. It is the first resource of those who know where true power comes from.

 

"Draw near to God and He will draw near to you." James 4:8

 

But prayer must lead to action. The same Nehemiah who prayed also picked up a trowel. The same disciples who prayed at Pentecost walked out into the streets of Jerusalem and proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus Christ at the risk of their lives. Faith without works, James reminds us, is dead (James 2:17).

 

So here, practically, is the call:

 

Pray — with urgency, with persistence, with faith. Pray for righteous leaders. Pray for the protection of children. Pray for the Church to wake up. Pray for your pastor, your neighbours, your government.

 

Speak — share the gospel in your everyday conversations, simply and without fear. Plant seeds. You are not responsible for the harvest. God tends to that. You are responsible for the planting.

 

Vote — according to your convictions, not merely for the lesser of evils. Support candidates who share your values. Engage with local politics: school boards, municipal councils, provincial legislatures. These are not secular arenas that Christians should avoid. They are the places where decisions are made that affect the lives of your children and neighbours.

 

Give — your time, your resources, your talents. Support organizations that are fighting for parental rights, religious freedom, and constitutional liberties. Support your local church generously. Consider whether your church's charitable status is limiting its prophetic voice — and what, together, you might do about that.

 

Parent — take back the education of your children. Know what they are being taught. Engage with teachers and school boards. Speak up at parent council meetings. Consider alternative educational options where necessary. The government does not have the right to determine the moral formation of your child. You do.

 

"You, therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things that you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. You therefore must endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ." 2 Timothy 2:1–3

 

None of this requires you to be a pastor, a politician, or a public intellectual. It requires only that you be faithful — in the place where God has put you, with the people He has put around you, with the gifts He has given you. The greatest revival in history may well be made up of thousands of ordinary acts of faithfulness, performed by ordinary believers who simply refused to be silent.

 

The door is still open. Jesus is still knocking. And the answer He is waiting for is yours.

 

"With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26