(Tim McLean was the victim of a knife attack on a Greyhound bus.)

Members of a fundamentalist American church group planning to stage a protest at the funeral for a Winnipeg man brutally killed on a Greyhound bus have managed to enter Canada, a spokeswoman told CBC News on Friday.

Canadian border guards are under orders to prevent members the Westboro Baptist Church, a controversial Kansas-based sect, from entering the country.

The group intends to picket the funeral of 22-year-old Tim McLean to tell Canadians his slaying on July 30 was God's response to Canadian policies enabling abortion, homosexuality and divorce and remarriage.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day's office sent an alert to border patrol to "look out" for people with signs and pamphlets consistent with the messages that the church promotes and to keep them out of the country.

But Shirley Phelps-Roper, daughter of church founder Fred Phelps, said a group of church members was turned away from a border crossing at Niagara Falls, but a small group did manage to get into Manitoba overnight.

"They were looking for picket signs and they were looking for leaflets. Well, we don't do leaflets, and the picket signs, you know, Fed Ex ships them overnight," she said.

However, Phelps-Roper said the reaction the group has raised from some police and public officials has her questioning whether the planned protest will go ahead.

"The question to my mind [is] whether or not we ought to get them the heck out of that country, because that's some crazy stuff when you've got your officials talking like they are in a back-alley brawl and not government officials who took an oath to obey the law and so forth."

Phelps-Roper said she would advise church members not to go ahead with the protest if she was concerned they would be arrested or harmed.

(A counter-protest is planned.)