Paul Tuns:

On Feb. 18, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal ordered Barry Neufeld, a former Chilliwack, British Columbia school trustee, to pay $750,000 to a teacher’s union for his insistence that there are only two genders.

The BC HRT decision ruled that Neufeld made discriminatory comments against LGBTQ teachers over a five-year period in his social media posts. The Tribunal’s decision said, these posts “amounted to hate speech and that Mr. Neufeld discriminated against LGBTQ teachers based on their sexual orientation and gender identity and expression in relation to their employment, given Mr. Neufeld’s role as a school trustee.” The Tribunal also criticized Neufeld’s opposition to so-called gender-affirming care for minors including body-mutilating surgeries.

The BC HRT said in its ruling, “If a person elects not to ‘believe’ that gender identity is separate from sex assigned at birth, then they do not ‘believe’ in transpeople” and that “This is a form of existential denial.” It insisted, “to accept that a person is transgender, one must accept that their gender identity is different than their sex assigned at birth.”

The Tribunal approvingly quoted an unnamed teacher who identifies as “queer” and uses “she/they” pronouns who felt uncomfortably being openly queer in the classroom because of Neufeld’s statements on LGBTQ people: “I think that teachers teach with their heart, and a lot of our personality goes into that, and without being able to be your authentic self, you’re not able to show up wholly.”

The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation filed a complaint with the Tribunal on behalf of the Chilliwack Teachers’ Association, citing his social media posts, emails, and speeches, including his criticism of another trustee, Carin Bondar, who posted sexually explicit content online.

The BC HRT said of the $750,000 penalty, that the per-person dollar amounts awarded were “reasonable, if not modest.” The fine goes to the Chilliwack Teachers’ Association to divvy up as it deems appropriate.

In interviews following the decision, Neufeld said he “could never” pay the $750,000 penalty.

The Tribunal said it sometimes orders a person to undergo sensitivity training but decided against imposing it upon Neufeld, stating, “in this case, we are not persuaded such an order would have any beneficial effect in this complaint, given Mr. Neufeld’s clearly entrenched views.”

Neufeld’s lawyer, James Kitchen, said, “The tribunal was not impartial,” with one member a known promoter of gender ideology. Kitchen said the decision was “to be expected.”

Neufeld has said he will appeal the decision, applying for a judicial review of the ruling. Kitchen said he anticipates a years-long battle that will eventually end up in the B.C. Supreme Court.

Chris Elston, better known as Billboard Chris, a critic of gender ideology, tweeted, “The Tribunal has declared that all British Columbians must believe in gender identities.”

OneBC Party MLA Dallas Brodie (Vancouver-Quilchena), criticized the ruling, saying the Tribunal was the “left-wing political enforcement arm of the BC NDP government.”

OneBC Party MLA Tara Armstrong (Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream) introduced a bill, Human Rights Code Repeal Act, to scrap the human rights code and enforcement apparatus, including the tribunal. Introducing her bill, Armstrong said her motivation for doing so was to “end the assault on freedom of speech by our Human Rights Tribunal,” noting that the previous week it “fined Barry Neufeld three-quarters of a million dollars for refusing to believe that a man could become a woman, for his own personal opinions.”

The NDP government majority was joined by Green MLAs to defeat the bill 50-37 on first reading, which was supported by OneBC and Conservative MLAs.

Further political fallout of the ruling against Neufeld included the resignation of Chilliwack School Board District 33 trustee Laurie Throness, who said on his Facebook page on Feb. 26 that effectively immediately he was stepping down from the school board. “I can no longer do my job,” said Throness. “Since I no longer feel safe in expressing myself on the Board in legitimate ways, the only proper course is to resign.”