Staff at Pile O’ Bones Brewing Co. in Regina said they refused to serve two guests on Friday afternoon whom they referred to as “racist protesters.”
Josh Morrison is director of operations for the brewery and said he was sitting at a table with his wife when he noticed a man and a woman come in and said they resembled those on a video shared by multiple media outlets.
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In the video, a couple is seen removing a residential school memorial on the steps of the Saskatchewan Legislature Building, shovelling the items into a garbage bag.
The incident happened on Thursday afternoon at the Protest to Protect rally organized by individuals calling on the provincial government to bring in restrictions to help deal with an increase in COVID-19 cases.
The man and woman in the video are known as anti-vaccine protesters.
Morrison said the duo were bothering other patrons at Pile O’ Bones, so he decided to take action.
“I made a call that these folks that are racists like that, they’re not welcome at our establishment. So I walked out over there and I politely asked them to leave. They refused,” Morrison told Global News.
The man and woman refused, prompting the brewery to call the police.
While waiting for police to arrive, Morrison said the couple decided to get up and leave but not before shouting antisemitic and other racist remarks. Staff ended up escorting the couple off the premises.
“That’s just not going to happen in my community,” Morrison said Sunday.
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Morrison is Métis, along with others in the ownership group, and he said they take Indigenous issues and reconciliation very seriously.
“We got a lot of messages on Facebook saying, ‘Oh, thanks for making that a hard choice.’ It wasn’t a hard choice. It’s an easy choice to stand up to racism. We’re not going to stand for it,” Morrison said.
Doug Schmidt, a bartender at Pile O’ Bones, wasn’t working on Friday but was at the brewery and saw the couple come in.
Schmidt said there were beliefs, attitudes and commentary coming from the patio that he described as “disgusting and deplorable.”
“Not only does the business not stand for it but society shouldn’t either,” he said.
Schmidt did see some other patrons get up and leave because of the incident.
“It really did disrupt the overall feeling of the room and the establishment,” Schmidt added.
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“As a society, we’re so beyond that and we know what the right thing is to do to reconcile and make things better for generations ahead of us, and the actions that were carried out by these two, again, absolutely disgusting. There’s no place for it in society,” Schmidt said.
The brewery first posted about the incident on its Instagram and Facebook pages on Saturday. The Instagram post has garnered more than 1,800 likes and many comments praising staff for their actions. The Facebook post had been liked more than 2,300 times and had more than 650 shares at the time this article was published.