As Canadian parliament debates legislation to criminalize supposed hate speech, comments against “gender ideology” in the curriculum have already cost a former British Columbia school board member the equivalent of more than half a million U.S. dollars.A nurse who got kicked out of her own union for gender-critical views said the verdict against ex-Chilliwack Board of Education trustee Barry Neufeld shows “I do not have a snowball’s chance in hell” before the same quasi-judicial body.
The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal ordered Neufeld to pay $750,000 Canadian to all LGBTQ-identified members of the Chilliwack Teachers’ Association for “injury to their dignity, feelings, and self-respect,” citing discrimination in employment, hate speech and “discriminatory publications” on Facebook, “statements made in Board meetings, rallies, and interviews.”
Neufeld was one of the “loudest critics” of the Ministry of Education approving resources and tools intended to create an “inclusive education environment” on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, as required by the province’s update of the Human Rights Code, the tribunal’s decision says.
The trustee described SOGI 123, as the resources are known, as a “weapon of propaganda” that threatens “traditional family values” and teaches children the “absurd theory” and “lie” that “gender is not biologically determined, but a social construct,” which distances children from their parents and makes them ripe for sexual abuse.
“For five years, he publicly denigrated LGBTQ people and teachers and associated them with the worst forms of child abuse,” the verdict says.
Neufeld made six statements “likely to expose trans and/or gay and lesbian people to hatred or contempt” based on SOGI and 24 that “indicate discrimination, or an intention to discriminate, against LGBTQ people in public education.
The tribunal also ordered him to pay “Teacher C,” a male who identifies as a woman and quit teaching because “Neufeld’s repeated transphobic comments, while not aimed at me directly, have hurt me personally,” for “expenses incurred by the discrimination.”
Nurse Amy Hamm said last week she’s still awaiting action by the tribunal in response to her summer 2025 complaints against the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives for suspending her license and fining her over $90,000 for her gender-critical views, and Vancouver Coast Health for firing her in response.
Best known for her billboard praising Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling for her gender-critical views, Hamm wrote in The National Post that she’ll still challenge BCCNM and her former employer in “that den of woke zealots, regardless” of its ruling against Neufeld.
She mocked the tribunal for its “contradictory assertion” that Neufeld both erased “trans existence” and “weaponize” their existence as a “threat to children, families, and social order,” and its practice of assigning pronouns to each witness, “a wholly unnecessary move that signals their fealty to the gender doctrine.”
Showing its unprofessionalism, the tribunal noted the B.C. Supreme Court dismissed Neufeld’s defamation lawsuit against a claimant’s witness but gave no legal analysis or explained its relevance to its own verdict, “adduced purely as an insult.” It also put scare quotes around Neufeld’s “credentials” without challenging their authenticity.
The B.C. Nurses’ Union dropped Hamm for alleged discrimination, including in her Post columns, Hamm said Thursday, promising further details when she’s not “too pissed off to think straight.”
B.C. legislative assemblyman Harman Bhangu, who is running for provincial Conservative Party leader, is circulating a petition to Premier David Eby to “Dismantle these kangaroo courts!” that fined Neufeld and Hamm.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “Combatting Hate Act” (Bill C-9), currently stuck in committee, could be used to “prohibit peaceful protests that the government dislikes” but it is “not the cause of the long erosion of free speech in Canada,” law professor Bruce Pardy, executive director of classically liberal advocacy group Rights Probe, wrote in the Post last week.
Supposed “guaranteed rights” are the “doublespeak of the modern managerial state,” he wrote. Government bodies routinely violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by banning protests and jokes “intended to offend someone’s dignity on a protected ground” while coercing preferred pronouns and punishing doctors for medical views at odds with the government and Hamm for flouting “regulatory ideology,” he said.
“Legislation that requires reasonable speech is totalitarian, since the government is choosing the words that come out of your mouth,” Pardy wrote. “If you are free, you can express yourself even if it does not serve democracy or help to discover truth.”
