“I came to the United States with a simple warning: You’re next,” Pastor Artur Pawloski, who was arrested Sept. 27 at a Calgary airport, said during a recent Fox News appearance.
Before his arrest last week after returning home, Pawloski had already embarrassed Canadian authorities earlier this year after a Youtube video showed him chasing away city inspectors who had entered his church during Easter weekend to enforce 15% capacity.
“Out! Get out of this property immediately!” the pastor, who lived under Communism in his native Poland, yelled as six city officials faced him down. “Ouuut! Get out immediately! Gestapo is not allowed here! Ouuut!”
The five-minute video filmed by the pastor shows the parade of six people walking away and then the irate pastor, after turning the camera around, reacts to the incident in his broken English. “What is wrong with those sick psychopaths? It’s beyond me,” he says to the camera. “Wow. Wow. How dare they! How dare they! Sick people. Sick people.”
The local authorities were not done with the defiant pastor, however. In May, the very next month, the pastor and his brother David were arrested by the Calgary Police Service for holding an “illegal in-person gathering” that defied local health orders.
According to Alberta’s latest statistics, the province has documented 2,731 fatalities 18 months into the pandemic out of approximately 300,000 confirmed cases.
Alberta’s population is 4.3 million and Calgary, with a population of 1.3 million, is the biggest city.
Pawloski has a court date Oct. 13 to answer civil charges related to the church gatherings that could put him behind bars for up to four years, Fox News reported.
Over the summer, and four months after that arrest, the well-known pastor has crisscrossed the United States to warn this country that Soviet-style tyranny is crushing freedom in the name of protecting the public from a virus.
Pawloski was interviewed by Fox News host Laura Ingraham after authorities were waiting for him on the tarmac Sept. 27 when he returned home to Calgary after his U.S. trip.
“This is feeling very Soviet to me,” Ingraham told the pastor after his airport arrest. “I know it sounds like an exaggeration but it’s incremental, and I’m stunned that more people aren’t speaking up, speaking out, and saying, We’re not doing this anymore. You’re not going to do this to us anymore.”
“I was handcuffed like a common criminal, like a terrorist," the pastor said of his arrest, which he compared to Communist police intimidating a frightened populace. "They wanted to break me. They wanted to show the whole world, You see what we do to those who dare to speak against our tyranny?”
Those who lived under Soviet-style Communism have said fear of arrest and torture was a constant fear because of the unlimited power police had over the populace. According to Pawlowski, his family lived in constant fear of police crashing into their home to drag someone away and he insists Canadian authorities are using that same fear to intimidate fellow Canadian to submit to illegal COVID rules and mandates.
Sarah Miller, an attorney for Pawloski, told Fox News his airport arrest is “unusual” because he could have been notified of charges and signed paperwork at home without being arrested.
"I think that would be the ordinary way to do it," she said, “but if you've been following Artur Pawlowski's story, there's nothing ordinary about the way he is treated by officials."
Brian Rushfeldt, a longtime Christian conservative activist based in Calgary, tells American Family News that persecution is coming for the Church if it pushes back against Canada's far-left progressive culture.
"I think we're going to see a very strong anti-Christian move within the next two or three years at all levels of government in Canada," he predicts.
