Juno News - June 01, 2020


School trustee Barry Neufeld is back in the news

Topics
Barry Neufeld Facebook post controversy
Mentioned
Barry Neufeld Theresa Tam Glenn Hansman Ann Coulter Rob Fleming Chilliwack
Enough is enough – reopen the economy! Is regulation the answer to Big Tech censorship？

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

153.38

Word count

981

Sentence count

47

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Barry Neufeld is a school trustee in Chilliwack, BC, who has been accused of anti-choice and anti-gay propaganda. He has been censured by the Board of Trustees of the British Columbia Association of School Trustees, and has been reported to the BC Human Rights Commissioner.

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 Several months ago, I outlined the 2017-2018 controversy surrounding Barry Neufeld, who is
00:00:12.400 an elected school trustee in Chilliwack, BC, that spoke out against SOGI123, which is a sexual
00:00:19.440 education resource toolkit in BC that promotes transgender ideology to young children. You know,
00:00:25.440 the idea that there's no biological males and females and all that kind of stuff. So Neufeld was
00:00:30.320 always very clear that he is opposed to the SOGI123 educational resource. He said he considers it
00:00:37.520 child abuse, a comment he later apologized for, but even if he's opposed to the resource, he is still
00:00:43.760 very supportive of LGBTQ people. However, the BC Teachers Federation president at the time and BC's
00:00:51.520 education minister were calling on him to resign, and the BC Teachers Federation filed a human rights
00:00:58.080 complaint against Neufeld, and the local QP411 union, which is composed of the educational assistance
00:01:05.520 and maintenance staff and all that, they filed a second BC Human Rights Tribunal complaint against
00:01:10.880 Neufeld. And so there was this all-out coordinated attack against Neufeld's character with all of
00:01:17.600 these people trying to oust him from his position. But amidst all this controversy, there was a
00:01:24.000 municipal election in 2018, and despite everything going on, Neufeld was successfully re-elected by
00:01:31.360 the people of Chilliwack. But now Barry Neufeld is back in the news, and again his colleagues are
00:01:37.600 trying to get him to resign. This is because on May 9th, 2020, Neufeld published a Facebook post that read,
00:01:46.160 It just dawned on me. Who is perpetrating all this fear over the dreaded coronavirus?
00:01:51.920 Why, it is the World Health Organization, the same outfit that claims easy access to abortion
00:01:56.720 is a human right, and is promoting mandated comprehensive sexuality education for little
00:02:01.680 kids that gender is not binary. Pre-pubescent children should be allowed to choose their gender
00:02:06.720 and sterilize themselves. And Dr. Theresa Tam, Canadian Head of Public Health, is suspected by
00:02:12.160 Wikipedia of being transgender. If this person, who has spent a major portion of their life deceiving 1.00
00:02:18.080 people as to who she slash she truly is, and is now a major player in the corrupt World Health
00:02:23.760 Organization, why should we believe anything he slash she says? Of course, outrage ensued over this post
00:02:31.200 because he criticizes the World Health Organization for supporting abortion and the gender transitioning of
00:02:36.960 children. And because he also claims Dr. Theresa Tam is transgender. And presumably he's saying that
00:02:44.160 because there was this incident where a troll edited Tam's Wikipedia page to say that she was born a male,
00:02:51.680 but that's not verified information and that edit was only up for a few hours. When I read Neufeld's post,
00:02:58.960 I kind of thought, you know, this is an eccentric thing to write, you know, a bit kooky, but I don't get the vibe of it
00:03:06.160 being hateful or full of hate, you know, so and I know critics might say, well, that's just a result of your white cisgender 0.60
00:03:13.680 privilege that you're not offended by it. But, you know, I would say at most this is maybe provocative or he might be trying to get a reaction.
00:03:22.400 But that that doesn't mean that it's hateful. But you had people affiliated with the school board,
00:03:28.560 such as former BC Teachers Federation President Glenn Hansman and the chair of the Chilliwack School Board,
00:03:35.600 Dan Coulter, saying this post was awful, disturbing, bigoted, hateful. And Education Minister Rob Fleming
00:03:45.040 is going so far as to report Neufeld to the BC Human Rights Commissioner. There's also a petition
00:03:51.280 with over 20,000 signatures that is calling for Neufeld to resign. And, you know, over 20,000,
00:03:57.920 that's pretty significant. But I do wonder how many of these people who signed it are actually from
00:04:04.240 Chilliwack, BC. Neufeld did apologize and say he regrets the comments, which was the right thing to do.
00:04:11.360 But he has faced heavy censure. So as part of the decision to censure Neufeld,
00:04:17.680 the board decided he will not have any school liaison duties, he will be removed from committees
00:04:24.240 and committee work, and will also not be invited to any school district events where students or
00:04:30.880 staff will be in attendance. So they're they're trying to ice him out and make him feel so excluded
00:04:37.440 that he'll voluntarily leave because they're not allowed to kick off an elected representative,
00:04:43.200 frankly. So they're trying so hard. They've actually been trying for years to get rid of this guy,
00:04:49.040 but they just can't. So they're trying to make him feel so alienated and uncomfortable that he'll
00:04:54.480 just voluntarily leave. But I hope he can stick it out. And if we look at what the definition of what
00:04:59.600 a school trustee actually does, let's look at the webpage of the British Columbia School Trustees
00:05:04.960 Association here. Trustees engage their communities in building and maintaining a school system that
00:05:11.040 reflects local priorities, values and expectations. School trustees listen to their communities,
00:05:16.240 guide the work of their school district and set plans, policies and the annual budget. So note that
00:05:21.440 first line reflecting local priorities and values and expectations. So Chilliwack, BC is actually more
00:05:27.200 of a conservative and religious community in BC. So you might expect in Vancouver, which is a, you know,
00:05:34.800 urban progressive liberal place for there to be more of a championing of trans ideology. But you know,
00:05:41.200 the people of Chilliwack are just not into that as a collective, right? So that's why Neufeld,
00:05:47.840 despite the controversy over SOGI-123, he still got elected in October 2018. And the next municipal
00:05:54.960 election in Chilliwack is in 2022. So if Neufeld runs again, we'll see if the electors vote him in again,
00:06:01.920 just as they did in 2018, even though he was in the middle of a controversy back then.
00:06:07.360 I'm Lindsay Shepard with True North. Thanks so much for watching, and I will see you next week.