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Two Covid convictions against Pastor Koopman vacated

Four years after the fact, two of more than 20 Covid-era convictions against Rev. John Koopman, pastor of the Chilliwack Free Reformed Church, have now been vacated, which is to say, undone.

Pastor Koopman was charged for taking part in worship services in 2020 and 2021, at a time when the province’s Health Officer imposed a complete ban on in-person worship services, even while bars, gyms, and other secular establishments were allowed to stay open. The Chilliwack Free Reformed Church opened their doors for worship, while complying with all of the other public health orders such as social distancing and masking.

The church then joined a couple of other churches in launching a constitutional challenge to the Health Order. They were represented in court by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), as they reported it, another issue at play was religious discrimination:

“Pastor Koopman and other pastors then submitted an accommodation request to the BC Provincial Health Office to gather for in-person services, but their request received no response for several weeks. At the same time, Dr. Henry’s office had been responding within one or two days to accommodation requests from Orthodox Synagogues, permitting them to gather indoors.”

The lower court dismissed the churches’ challenge in March of 2021 in part, the JCCF reports, because the churches had just been allowed to gather outdoors. Meanwhile the charges against the pastors and the churches continued on. They faced $40,000 in fines. Many of these charges were later dropped or reduced, but Pastor Koopman was convicted of others, most recently as of Feb. 2025.

Now two of those convictions have been vacated but based on technicalities, rather than a real assessment of what happened. As the JCCF noted:

“While the correction resolved a technical error in the court record, it did not address the broader constitutional concerns raised about the ban on in-person worship services and the unequal treatment of faith communities during lockdowns.”

Pastor Koopman was also grateful for the Crown’s acknowledgement of error:

“Dr. Henry and the government should carefully evaluate their entire approach, for this is only one of many errors which were made, the greatest of which is the restriction of the public worship of our God.”