After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree and attending divinity school in the United States, he was ordained as a minister in the Reformed Presbyterian Church General Assembly.
He operated a small freight delivery company in Ontario's Niagara region in the 1990s, and served as the pastor of Living Hope Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Vineland.
[2][3] He later worked toward a Master's degree at McMaster University's Divinity School, writing about the efforts of early Christian apologists to lobby Roman Emperors.
Emmanuel was a candidate for the socially conservative Family Coalition Party in the Lincoln electoral division in the 1995 Ontario provincial election.
Emmanuel argued that problems of unemployment and economic development could only be solved by a free-market system, and called for the government to shift welfare services to community organizations.
Emmanuel ran against prominent federal politician Sheila Copps in a 1996 by-election as a candidate of the Christian Heritage Party of Canada.
[5] He argued that Canada's Young Offenders Act should be abolished and corporal punishment reintroduced to schools, and was quoted as saying, "If an eleven-year-old murders someone, I think his life should be taken.
Emmanuel also ran for the Christian Heritage Party in the 1997 federal election, and finished fifth against Liberal incumbent Walt Lastewka.
The New Democratic Party of Ontario (NDP) issued a press release with excerpts from several of Emmanuel's writings, asserting that he had described gay men as "sexual deviants"[3][7][9] and Islam as "as far from peace, as hell is from heaven" in separate articles written in 2002.
[10] As executive director of the ECP Centre, Emmanuel organized several public forums throughout 2003 to discuss same-sex marriage and the extension of Canada's hate speech laws to cover statements made against gays and lesbians.
[11] Emmanuel campaigned against the legal recognition of same-sex marriage in Canada in 2005, organizing several rallies across the country, including one outside Parliament Hill in Ottawa and another at Queen's Park outside the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.