Hutton was ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada in the 1960s, and worked as a high school guidance counsellor in the same period.
[11] Hutton was councillor Harvey Smith's campaign manager in the 1998 Winnipeg municipal election, and supported Glen Murray's successful bid to become mayor.
[13] He also opposed the creation of a drug treatment centre in Winnipeg's Central Park area, arguing that it had only recently shed its reputation as a drug- and crime-invested region.
[14] Hutton traveled to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1996, and appealed for overseas sponsors of Serb children whose lives had been disrupted by the country's wars of secession.
[16] He noted that NATO bombed several industrial buildings in Kosovo that released dangerous chemicals into the air, and added "[t]here are people that are going to be very cold this winter because we blew up the heating plants in Belgrade".