Why Was a Former School Trustee Fined $750,000?

More than eight years after former Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld published his first of dozens of online posts denouncing LGBTQ2S(IA)+ education resources and people themselves, the BC Human Rights Tribunal has ruled Neufeld violated the province’s Human Rights Code.

Specifically, the tribunal determined Neufeld engaged in discriminatory conduct towards employees, discriminatory publishing and hate speech.

These include, but are not limited to, false claims that the Education Ministry-approved resources and queer and trans teachers are “grooming” children for sexual abuse, that sexual offenders benefit from “confusing” children about gender dysphoria, and that gender-affirming care causes premature illness and death.

The tribunal, which based its decision on 30 of Neufeld’s numerous online social media posts, speeches and blog posts published between 2017 and 2022, as well as witness testimony from LGBTQ2S+ Chilliwack educators and University of British Columbia nursing professor Elizabeth Saewyc, ordered Neufeld to pay the Chilliwack Teachers’ Association $750,000 for damages to the estimated five to 16 per cent of Chilliwack educators who are LGBTQ2S+.

Once the payment is made, the teachers’ association has six months to identify beneficiaries and disburse the money. The number of LGBTQ2S+ educators in the district was extrapolated from Egale Canada’s Every Teacher Project estimate that 16 per cent of Canadian teachers are LGBTQ2S+, Statistics Canada’s census data showing 4.4 per cent of people 15 and older identified as LGBTQ2S+ and the Chilliwack Teachers’ Association’s estimate that it had 1,020 members during the complaint period.

There has been criticism of the amount of funding awarded. The tribunal decision states individual recipients will get anywhere from $4,601 to $16,667 each, less than half of what complainants in similar tribunal rulings have received.

The tribunal does not have the authority to enforce this financial penalty. And Neufeld, who served on the school board from 1992 to 2008 and again from 2011 to 2022, has already declared his intention to apply for a judicial review at the B.C. Supreme Court.

How you view the tribunal’s decision may depend on where you sit on the political spectrum and whether you agree with the limits of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms when individuals violate provincial human rights codes protecting vulnerable groups from hate.

But a Chilliwack teacher who testified at the BC Human Rights Tribunal hearing told The Tyee Neufeld’s comments had a direct impact on them and their colleagues.

“In my opinion, these posts incited a lot of hate from the wider community,” they said. The Tyee is withholding the teacher’s name to protect them from harassment.

Freedom of expression?

Neufeld’s first post, published on Facebook on Oct. 23, 2017, contained a lot of inaccuracies about the province’s then-recent update to the Human Rights Code. The post also targeted a change to school anti-bullying policies to include gender-diverse people as a protected class from discrimination and the introduction of SOGI 123 education resources. SOGI 123 — which stands for sexual orientation and gender identity — are optional, age-appropriate learning resources, teacher professional development materials and district policy templates created in a collaboration among the province, school districts, the University of British Columbia’s education faculty and the non-profits ARC Foundation and Out in Schools.

Neufeld also cited in his post the American College of Pediatricians, a socially conservative organization often confused with the American Academy of Pediatrics, the professional association of U.S. pediatricians. Unlike the Academy of Pediatrics, the College of Pediatricians is against gender-affirming care for kids and youth, access to abortion and sexual health education in schools.

“OK, so I can no longer sit on my hands. I have to stand up and be counted. A few years ago, the Liberal minister of education instigated a new curriculum supposedly to combat bullying. But it quickly morphed into a weapon of propaganda to infuse every subject matter from K-12 with the latest fad: Gender Theory. The Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) program instructs children that gender is not biologically determined, but is a social construct. At the risk of being labelled a bigoted homophobe, I have to say that I support traditional family values and I agree with the College of paediatricians that allowing little children choose to change gender is nothing short of child abuse,” Neufeld’s post reads.

“But now the B.C. Ministry of Education has embraced the LGBTQ lobby and is forcing this biologically absurd theory on children in our schools. Children are being taught that heterosexual marriage is no longer the norm. Teachers must not refer to ‘boys and girls’ they are merely students. They cannot refer to mothers and fathers either (increasing numbers of children are growing up in homes with same sex parents). If this represents the values of Canadian society, count me out! I belong in a country like Russia, or Paraguay which recently had the guts to stand up to these radical cultural nihilists.”

Even before the tribunal’s ruling was released, the Conservative Party of BC and the provincial party OneBC had joined Neufeld in the call for the removal of SOGI 123 education resources from B.C. classrooms. At a OneBC town hall event held in Vancouver this weekend, Neufeld said he’d like to run for the party in the next election.

Last week MLA Tara Armstrong, a former member of both the Conservative Party of BC and OneBC, tabled a motion to repeal the provincial Human Rights Code, motivated by the tribunal’s decision and citing its “assault on freedom of speech.” Although the motion was rejected, the entire Conservative caucus voted in support.

Conservative Party of BC leadership candidate Caroline Elliott has called for the tribunal’s elimination on X, claiming Neufeld's financial penalty “kills free-speech and severely erodes democracy.”

Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre, who previously came out against prescribing puberty blockers for children and declared there were only two genders, also took to X, calling the BC Human Rights Tribunal penalty “insane” and “Orwellian.”

Poilievre mischaracterized the tribunal’s decision when he said in his X post that Neufeld’s offence was solely stating there were only two genders. He encouraged his followers to sign a petition on the party’s website supporting “free speech.”

Even X owner and world’s richest man Elon Musk, who is estranged from his trans daughter, chimed in to denounce human rights tribunals for “Soviet gulag show trial language” in response to a post about Neufeld’s fine.

More locally, former Chilliwack-Kent MLA Laurie Throness stepped down from his trustee position on the Chilliwack school board last week. Throness said that because of the ruling, he no longer felt “safe in expressing” himself on the board.

BC Human Rights Tribunal members Robin Dean, Laila Said and Devyn Cousineau seemed to anticipate detractors would summarize their 143-page ruling as an attack on freedom of expression, as the limits of the right to speech received their own subsection in their decision.

“The stakes are high: the lack of free expression is common to dictatorships and tyrannical regimes,” the decision reads.

However, freedom of expression may be limited where “in a given context, there are serious reasons to fear harm that is sufficiently specific and cannot be prevented by the discernment and critical judgment of the audience,” the decision says. “Examples include the law of defamation, restrictions on ‘obscene’ material, and prohibitions against hate speech.”

In 2018 both then-education minister Rob Fleming and the Chilliwack school board called on Neufeld to resign due to his public statements and posts.

He was even banned by his fellow trustees from visiting public schools in the district for four years, part of being censured by the board twice for defamatory comments including calling three Chilliwack Progress journalists an ableist slur and claiming Canada’s then-top doctor, Dr. Theresa Tam, was transgender.

Nevertheless, Neufeld remained a Chilliwack trustee until he lost the October 2022 school board election.

In 2023, Neufeld also lost a defamation case in the Supreme Court of Canada against former BC Teachers’ Federation president Glen Hansman for calling Neufeld’s posts hateful.

The following year he lost a civil defamation case in the B.C. Supreme Court brought by Chilliwack trustee Carin Bondar after he referred to her as a “striptease artist” during the 2022 election campaign.

Impact on Chilliwack schools

One of the educators who testified at the BC Human Rights Tribunal against Neufeld told The Tyee that framing the case as merely a “free speech” issue is, at best, missing the point and, at worst, using the decision as a political wedge.

“School trustees have a duty to uphold safe and inclusive learning environments and not undermine them,” said the educator.

“Barry Neufeld was the employer, and if he’s contributing to a hostile work environment or discriminating against his employees based on things that are protected by the Human Rights Code, that’s cut and dried to me.”

Neufeld’s posts may have been online, but their impact was felt in the schools, the educator told The Tyee.

They said those impacts ranged from teachers putting their gender or sexuality “back in the closet” or deciding not to come out at all, to queer and trans kids missing school, changing schools or turning to online learning due to increased bullying and hostility against LGBTQ2S+ people in schools.

Outside of school wasn’t much safer, the educator added, with LGBTQ2S+ people and their families faced with consistent public protests on street corners, on the highway and even in front of the school board building.

“One of the most impactful things is how this emboldened people,” the educator said, including negative interactions with parents who were suddenly concerned about what they called the “SOGI curriculum.”

SOGI 123 resources are not curriculum but optional, ministry-approved classroom learning resources that meet curriculum goals.

“You actually can’t teach many subjects in school without talking about identity, because it’s interwoven into most pieces of the curriculum: belonging, identity, family structure,” said the educator, including social studies, physical health and education, and English language arts.

“A lot of what we teach in the school curriculum is how to be a good person and how to live in a global community.”

Teachers of all genders and sexualities were afraid to use any of the sexual orientation and gender identity education resources in their lessons due to the pushback, the educator told The Tyee.

“People were scared to have these conversations in the classroom. There was a really big cultural shift after a lot of these posts came out,” they said.

“We were seeing a lot more posts on Facebook and people were leaving flyers on people’s cars about there only being two genders.”

Eight years after Neufeld began his misinformation campaign against sexual orientation and gender identity in schools and four years after he left the district, there is still a “hot and cold” atmosphere in local schools, with people both celebrating and decrying the tribunal’s decision.

While relieved about the ruling, the educator said they worry some teachers still “haven’t done their homework” when it comes to educating their students about SOGI 123 resources and how to identify misinformation about LGBTQ2S+ people and their allies.

But the tribunal decision still sends an important message, they said, “that trustees are responsible for upholding anti-discrimination policies, not eroding them.”

“I hope people educate themselves, honestly,” they said. “Because I don’t think SOGI-inclusive education is scary when you actually look at what it does.”