From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

A 33 year-old Chinese filmmaker highlighted the biggest protests China has seen since Tiananmen Square using only film footage. For this crime of ‘provoking trouble,’ he has been sentenced to over three years in prison.

A Chinese filmmaker has been sentenced to three years and six months in prison for creating a documentary about protests against the Chinese government’s heavy-handed COVID-era restrictions.

A Shanghai court sentenced 33-year-old Chen Pinlin, CNN reported, following his conviction for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a charge used to target dissenting Chinese political activists, including journalists.

Pinlin’s apparent crime was his creation of “Urumqi Middle Road,” a film that showed a glimpse of the Chinese government’s tyrannical COVID-19 crackdown and featured ensuing “White Paper” protests, named for white pieces of paper held up by street demonstrators in place of signs, to avoid Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censorship.

The protest movement was sparked by a deadly apartment fire in Urumqi which claimed at least 10 lives, reportedly due to COVID lockdown measures that prevented both the escape of inhabitants and timely rescue efforts. Street vigils cropped up in late November 2022 to remember the deceased, morphing into protests that caught on in several major cities of China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Xi’an.

The protests became an outlet for the indignation and anguish caused by draconian COVID policies country-wide, and called for an end to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policies, which mandated that citizens be cruelly locked in their own homes for weeks on end. In Shanghai, for example, the government enforced residence confinement in some cases by sealing or padlocking doors.

At the time, China expert Steve Mosher warned that the deadly toll of Shanghai’s ongoing lockdowns would be “much greater” than any potential lives lost due to COVID, and predicted deaths by starvation, strokes and heart attacks.

According to CNN, the White Paper protests, which often directly attacked Xi Jinping, were the largest China had seen since the 1989 student-led Tiananmen Square demonstration. Pinlin’s documentary, still available on YouTube outside of China, includes film footage of White Paper protestors crying, “We want dignity!” “We want the truth!” “We want human rights!”

Masses of protestors also called for Xi Jinping to step down. Some cried for the “removal of traitor Xi Jinping,” and one man can be heard shouting, “Without the Communist Party, there would be a new China!”

The name of the English version of Pinlin’s film is “Not the Foreign Force,” in objection to claims by the CCP that “foreign forces” had fomented protests against the Chinese government.

“I hope to explore why, whenever internal conflicts arise in China, foreign forces are always made the scapegoat,” wrote Pinlin. The answer is clear to everyone: the more the government misleads, forgets, and censors, the more we must speak up, remind others, and remember. Only by remembering the ugliness can we strive toward the light. I also hope that China will one day embrace its own light and future.”subscribe to our daily headlines

Chen “has only ever served the public interest by reporting on historical protests against the regime’s abuses and should never have been arrested. We call on democracies to increase pressure on Chinese authorities to ensure that all charges against Chen are dropped,” Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in a statement in March.

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

On January 30, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Bradford Smith ruled that shipping giant Purolator must compensate employees it fired for refusing to take the COVID shot, in accordance with a Labor Arbitrator’s decision in December 2023.

A British Columbia Supreme Court judge has upheld a labor arbitrator’s decision that Purolator employees fired for refusing the COVID shot must be compensated.  

On January 30, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Bradford Smith ruled that shipping giant Purolator must compensate employees it fired for refusing to take the COVID shot, in accordance with a Labor Arbitrator‘s decision in December 2023. 

“I find there was no procedural unfairness to Purolator,” Smith wrote in his ruling.  

Beginning September 15, 2021, Purolator, like many Canadian companies around that time, mandated that its workers get the COVID shot to continue working. Workers were given until December 25, 2021, to comply, with the full policy coming into force on January 10, 2022.   

However, last December an arbitrator ruled that Purolator’s vaccine mandate was reasonable only until June 30, 2022, when evidence sufficiently proved that the COVID vaccine did not prevent transmission of the COVID virus. 

“[The arbitrator] determined that the balancing of interests was not fixed in time, but something which could change as circumstances changed,” wrote Smith.  

“He found that as of the end of June 2022, circumstances had indeed changed, such that the [vaccination policy], although reasonable when it was implemented, was no longer reasonable after that date,” he continued.  

Regardless of this development, Purolator kept the mandate in place until June 2023, barring unvaccinated employees from working.  

As a result, Arbitrator Nicholas Glass ruled that Purolator must give compensation to its hourly employees who did not get the COVID shots, which included the lost benefits and wages they would have earned between July 1, 2022, and May 1, 2023.    

Purolator had also been ordered to give compensation to owner-operators beginning from the first date they lost income.   

Following this decision, Purolator took the case to the B.C. Supreme Court, only to have the ruling upheld by Smith.   

“The Arbitrator clearly proceeded on the basis that employees’ personal autonomy and bodily integrity interests were engaged, and it was reasonable for him to do so,” reads the decision.  

“I find the Decision is transparent, intelligible and justified, and thus reasonable,” wrote Smith. 

The favorable ruling for the Purolator workers is one of the latest positive outcomes for Canadians who lost income, or their jobs outright, for choosing not to get the COVID shots.   

In October 2023, LifeSiteNews reported on how a Canadian arbitrator in Saskatchewan ruled in favor of two oil refinery workers who were discriminated against at their workplace for not complying with COVID dictates.