Anmol Singh was tasked with securing the area around a COVID-19 vaccine clinic at the height of the pandemic when he was thrust into centre stage, he told the court on Tuesday.
The then-23-year-old South Asian immigrant got between prolific protester Bruce Orydzuk and Kelowna, B.C., reporter Carli Berry on July 13, 2021, after Berry approached Singh at the security tent and expressed some concern about Orydzuk.
“I’m having a conversation with somebody, get out of my face,” Orydzuk told Singh, in a video that Berry recorded.
Berry testified earlier that she made the recording because she was nervous about what Orydzuk was going to do, but it was later used in a story that she wrote.
“You can go back to your country. You’re not a Canadian. You’re not a Canadian. You are not Canadian. You’re disgusting … go back to India,” Orydzuk said.
That video went viral and gained condemnation from the premier, local politicians and beyond.
In recent weeks, however, it’s been the focal point of Oryzduk’s trial for disturbing the peace, and Singh spent the day being cross-examined by Orydzuk who is defending himself against the charge.
“When you stepped in, it was because of my change in voice?” Orydzuk asked Singh during another day of a trial fraught with delays and long pauses.
Oryzduk’s tone had changed, the court heard earlier, when he was speaking to Berry.
Singh told the court that he just didn’t want anything to escalate, nor for Orydzuk to harass Berry.
Orydzuk homed in on the concept that he was harassing Berry, asking Singh to qualify how he may have been doing that.
“(Berry) had already mentioned to me her interaction with him in the past … the tone increased when the conversation progressed… She was not feeling comfortable when she was talking to him, and if she’s not feeling comfortable, there’s something wrong with that situation,” Singh told the court.
Orydzuk then asked, “Did I actually harass her?”
Singh explained that while he couldn’t say how Orydzuk had been harassing Berry, his perspective as a security guard was that things were headed in that direction and that’s why he intervened.
“I could see that she didn’t want to talk to you,” Singh said.
During his cross-examination, Oryzduk also brought Singh’s attention to how he characterized him after the video went viral and police started investigating the incident as a hate crime.
“He’s actually the worst person I ‘ve ever met in my life, actually,” Singh told police about Orydzuk in 2021.
“He’s just mental, I don’t know, he just doesn’t know how to talk to people.”
Orydzuk asked Singh on Tuesday why he called him “mental” during that interview.
Singh explained that Orydzuk showed similar behaviour to mentally ill street people he’d interacted with previously through his role as a security guard.
Up to 70 per cent of his job, he said, was dealing with “homeless people or people with mental disorders, yelling at people for no reason.”
“I have never heard someone say, ‘You should be hanged’ when people were doing normal day-to-day things in their lives,” Singh told the court.
“One person, walking around saying he’s smart and everyone’s stupid … It made me think either he had some kind of mental disorder.”
Singh didn’t say what the other option was but, pointed out that Canada had not been “hanging” people in quite some time.
Canada ended the death penalty in 1962.
At the heart of the trial, however, is whether Oryzduk walking around, calling people names, and handing out pamphlets that laid out his view on the pandemic and vaccination deterred people from entering the clinic.
Crown counsel Kevin Short explained when the trial began in July that, by its end, he needs to demonstrate that Orydzuk’s actions weren’t just a nuisance — they prompted a change in behaviour for those who wanted to go into the clinic.
Singh told police that day he believed Orydzuk had done just that.
During Tuesday’s cross-examination, he characterized it as a point of conflict.
“A lot of people were giving them s—,” he said.
He also said that some people took the pamphlet and said nothing, others threw it away and 60 per cent of others engaged in a conflict.
“No one had a good response to the protest,” he said.
The trial was set for three days but has surpassed that mark. Short said he was potentially calling eight witnesses as the trial got underway.
The trial is moving at a glacial pace due to a variety of setbacks, one of which was an “unknown threat” at the courthouse which closed the building for the day.