Juno News - December 03, 2019


A systematic effort to undermine Barry Neufeld’s character and credibility

Topics
Barry Neufeld's character attack
Mentioned
Glenn Hansman Barry Neufeld Alan Ross Lindsay Shepard Gender Binary Rob Fleming Maintenance
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Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

151.08

Word count

1,258

Sentence count

54

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In October 2017, Chilliwack School Trustee Barry Neufeld felt obligated to speak out against SOGI 123, a resource kit for BC and Alberta teachers to teach children and youth about LGBTQ issues. In a move that would drastically shake up his career, he posted the words, "I can no longer sit on my hands. I have to stand up and be counted."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi everyone, Lindsay Shepard here, Investigative Journalism Fellow with True North.
00:00:09.320 You may have noticed the name of Barry Neufeld in the news recently, but who is he? If you haven't
00:00:15.400 been following this case, I am going to explain it all here. A little over two years ago, in October
00:00:20.680 2017, Chilliwack School Trustee Barry Neufeld felt obligated to speak out against SOGI-123,
00:00:27.660 that's Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity 123, a resource kit for BC and Alberta teachers
00:00:33.820 to teach children and youth about LGBTQ issues. In a move that would drastically shake up his
00:00:39.380 career, Neufeld posted the following on Facebook.
00:00:42.420 Okay, so I can no longer sit on my hands. I have to stand up and be counted. A few years
00:00:47.540 ago, the Liberal Minister of Education instigated a new curriculum, supposedly to combat bullying,
00:00:53.300 but it quickly morphed into a weapon of propaganda to infuse every subject matter from K to
00:00:57.620 12 with the latest fad, Gender Theory. The Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity program 0.69
00:01:04.860 instructs children that gender is not biologically determined, but is a social construct. At the
00:01:10.220 risk of being labelled a bigoted homophobe, I have to say that I support traditional family
00:01:14.620 values, and I agree with the College of Pediatricians that allowing little children to choose to change 0.93
00:01:20.240 gender is nothing short of child abuse. But now the BC Ministry of Education has embraced the LGBTQ lobby 1.00
00:01:27.480 and is forcing this biologically absurd theory on children in our schools. Children are being taught
00:01:32.920 that heterosexual marriage is no longer the norm. Teachers must not refer to boys and girls, they are merely
00:01:38.480 students. They cannot refer to mothers and fathers, either. Increasing numbers of children are growing up in homes with same-sex parents.
00:01:45.240 If this represents the values of Canadian society, count me out. I belong in a country like Russia,
00:01:52.480 or Paraguay, which recently had the guts to stand up to these radical cultural nihilists.
00:01:58.240 Mainstream media began covering Neufeld's post within hours, and a couple of days later, Neufeld apologized
00:02:04.480 specifically for his comment that allowing young children to change genders is child abuse. He made
00:02:10.960 it clear that he was critical of an educational resource, SOGI123, and not individual LGBTQ people
00:02:18.800 themselves. By the new year, in January 2018, Neufeld's colleagues had coordinated an all-out attack on his
00:02:26.400 character. And keep in mind, that October 2018, there will be a municipal election. Most of the attacks on
00:02:34.000 Barry Neufeld were coming from Glenn Hansman, then president of the BC Teachers Federation. Glenn Hansman is a
00:02:41.680 teacher and LGBTQ activist who said in media interviews that Neufeld should step down or be removed, that he
00:02:50.160 shouldn't be anywhere near students, and that he tiptoed quite far into hate speech. He also said that Neufeld holds
00:02:58.480 transphobic and bigoted views. Meanwhile, BC's Minister of Education, Rob Fleming, was formally
00:03:06.160 calling on Neufeld to resign, but Neufeld rejected the suggestion, and the Minister of Education does not
00:03:12.720 possess the authority to dismiss an individual trustee. The Chilliwack Board of Education was also
00:03:18.160 calling for Neufeld's resignation, but again, Neufeld wouldn't allow himself to be bullied into resigning.
00:03:24.560 The BC Teachers Federation, the BCTF, then filed a human rights complaint against Neufeld, alleging
00:03:30.720 that his public comments about trans people created an unsafe work environment for teachers
00:03:36.720 and exposed trans people to hatred. The complaint was accepted for filing by the BC Human Rights Tribunal
00:03:43.680 in April 2018. And as a side note, the BCTF describes itself as a social justice union.
00:03:50.720 They publish a quarterly social justice newsletter. If you open their most recent edition, you can read
00:03:57.600 articles like Intersectionality within the Women's Movement and Problematizing Heteronormativity and
00:04:04.400 Gender Binary in Schools. They also host a biennial social justice conference. They offer social justice
00:04:11.920 workshops and provide a variety of social justice grants worth thousands of dollars.
00:04:16.400 They employ an assistant director of social justice, and they encourage teachers to act as social
00:04:23.040 justice school representatives so that they can share social justice material with their school's
00:04:28.000 teaching staff. But it wasn't only the BCTF that filed a human rights complaint against Barry Neufeld.
00:04:33.680 QB 411, the Union of Education Assistance and Clerical, Custodial, Transportation and Maintenance staff in the
00:04:40.880 Chilliwack School District, they also filed a similar complaint with the BC Human Rights Tribunal, and the
00:04:47.040 tribunal accepted their complaint as well. So to recap, the BC Teachers Federation union leader was publicly
00:04:53.680 calling for Neufeld to step down or resign, and calling him a transphobe. The Minister of Education of the
00:05:00.720 the Province was saying Neufeld should step down, the Chilliwack School District was publicly saying
00:05:05.520 Neufeld should step down, and the BC Teachers Federation and another teaching staff union, QB 411,
00:05:12.320 filed human rights complaints against Neufeld. Not only was he being subject to attacks by union leaders
00:05:18.880 and bureaucratic higher-ups, but Neufeld was simultaneously being alienated by his colleagues throughout the year.
00:05:24.640 In February 2018, a BC School Trustee Association meeting was cancelled because Neufeld insisted he be able to attend,
00:05:32.640 because this was a BC School Trustee meeting, and Neufeld is a school trustee. However, the Maple Ridge School Board was
00:05:40.640 saying that Neufeld's presence would be a violation of their safe, caring, and healthy schools policy.
00:05:46.640 In June 2018, Neufeld was told by the school board that he was prohibited from being on stage with the other
00:05:54.240 trustees during a school graduation ceremony, and prohibited from shaking the hands of the graduating
00:05:59.920 students, all because his presence was apparently unsafe to LGBTQ individuals. Neufeld was being mobbed, attacked,
00:06:07.040 and snubbed by almost everyone surrounding him in his profession. Yet, he ran for re-election in October 2018, and he won.
00:06:15.600 But, one day before the election, Neufeld filed a defamation suit against Glenn Hansman, alleging Glenn
00:06:22.400 Hansman had publicly painted him as a transphobic, homophobic, bigot, unfit to work in schools, and that
00:06:28.880 he has suffered damages to his reputation professionally, socially, and generally within his community, across
00:06:34.720 Canada, and internationally. Enter 2019. On March 25, 2019, the Protection of Public Participation Act
00:06:43.440 came into force in British Columbia. The legislation's purpose is to protect public participation in
00:06:50.080 matters of public interest by attempting to balance the rights of individuals to protect their reputations
00:06:55.920 against the obvious benefit to a democratic society of protecting free speech and rigorous debate on
00:07:01.360 issues of public interest. The PPPA is comparable to so-called anti-SLAPP legislation, or strategic
00:07:08.000 lawsuits against public participation. Glenn Hansman applied to dismiss Neufeld's defamation action
00:07:13.760 against him pursuant to this new PPPA legislation, arguing that Neufeld sued him because of comments
00:07:20.400 that he made in relation to a subject that was of public interest. In a November 26, 2019 judgment,
00:07:27.040 Justice Alan Ross stayed Neufeld's lawsuit from proceeding any further, determining that Hansman
00:07:32.720 had established grounds for dismissing Neufeld's claim under the new legislation. Justice Ross wrote
00:07:38.560 that while the plaintiff has an interest in claiming damages and clearing his good name, the public has an
00:07:44.880 interest in protecting expressions that relate to public debate. So while the courts may have thrown out
00:07:50.320 Neufeld's defamation suit, it is still undeniable that Glenn Hansman and his Social Justice Union,
00:07:56.240 as well as the Education Minister and Chilliwack Board of Education, they were on a crusade to
00:08:01.040 systematically undermine Neufeld's character and credibility. And the crusade against Neufeld isn't
00:08:06.480 over yet. It's going to keep going through the BC Human Rights Tribunal cases filed against him by the
00:08:11.680 BCTF and by CUPE 411.