Barry Neufeld and the Wages of Being Evil

Two BC Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT) decisions came down last week, and they're important for a number of reasons.  Both are in the matter of Chilliwack Teacher's Association v. Barry Neufeld.  

Decision 10

Decision 11

This all goes back to when Neufeld was a School Trustee in Chilliwack and began actively publishing anti-transgender, anti-2SLGBTQ material online.  I won't spend a bunch of time tearing into Neufeld's claims - they are in the large the usual assortment of bogus claims about 2SLGBTQ people and transgender people in particular.  

The case as framed by the original complaint is interesting because the Chilliwack Teacher's Association (CTA) filed a complaint on behalf of a class of its membership rather than individual complaints.  Given that Neufeld was a person in a position of public power, this is a bit different than your average discrimination case involving direct attacks on an individual.  Neufeld appears to have used his position as a public figure to amplify his messaging, and it had direct impact on staff working for the Chilliwack school system who were members of the 2SLGBTQ community as a whole.  Consequently, what we have is a form of "class action" human rights complaint which is a bit unusual. 

My goal here is not to "relitigate" the decisions of the BCHRT - I'm certain that Neufeld will be appealing these into the courts with the assistance of any number of right wing legal agitprop organizations like Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) that routinely take on these cases both to grift donation money and in the hopes of driving a wedge into the existing body of case law.  The outcome of those appeals remains to be seen. 

However, I'm seeing a lot of people expressing "shock and outrage" over the amount of the awards, which runs to some $750,000.  However, I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the bigger issue.  Most discrimination cases involve actions that affect an individual, or possibly a couple of people.  

Here we have a case where the impact is much different because the actions taken by Neufeld affected teachers within the Chilliwack school system - not a single individual, but rather many individuals who were in the school system's employ at the time Neufeld was campaigning against 2SLGBTQ recognition in the schools.  

This is, to my knowledge, the first time in Canada that a discrimination case has been filed where the victims are not recorded as individuals who have been directly affected, but as members of a class of individuals who were directly and indirectly affected by the impugned activities.  This is what makes the amount of the fine so high.  Instead of the BCHRT assessing each case individually and handing out penalties, the amount is to be distributed by the CTA to its affected members.  This is not unlike a "class action lawsuit", where the amount of compensation per individual may not be a lot, but when there are a sizeable number of individuals in the Class, the gross amount can appear to be a "huge sum".  

Where this becomes interesting is in terms of its importance in future human rights case law.  It provides a means to pursue someone where they are attacking a class of individuals rather than actual individuals with their rhetoric.  In general, human rights law in Canada focuses on individual rights and has tended not to recognize attacks on identifiable groups very well.  

Neufeld made accusations in his publications that stated flat out that 2SLGBTQ people were pedophiles, or worse.  These aren't nuanced statements - they are cases where he deliberately associated 2SLGBTQ people as a whole with acts and behaviours that are both criminal and profoundly harmful to the victims.  It is not a small matter to accuse an individual of being a pedophile, it is no less harmful to accuse an entire class of people of such - especially from a person who is in a position of public power.

I have mused in the past about the need for some kind of "class libel" law in Canada where global aspersions against a class of people are often the tool of choice in justifying legislative attacks on those minorities.  In these cases, we often find - as we have seen with Barry Neufeld in BC, and certain pastors in Alberta, a tendency to claim that they are "merely expressing deeply held religious beliefs".  To me, these claims are the refuge of scoundrels - an escape hatch where anything can be justified by claiming it's "religious".  

"Deeply held religious beliefs" are fine - I don't actually care what a person believes.  However, there is a line that is crossed when those beliefs become justification for attacking the rights and freedoms of others in society.  If you want to believe that "all trans people are pedophiles", knock yourself out.  However, if you then turn around and demand that those same transgender people be banned from using public washrooms based on that belief, that's a different matter (especially when those "deeply held beliefs" have as much validity as claiming the world is flat).

Public figures need to understand that even if they "sincerely believe" something, there is a higher standard that they must hew to given their influence and sway.  Just because they "believe" something does not grant carte blanche to simply spew whatever they believe.  They have a duty and responsibility to ensure that their public utterances are in fact grounded in reason and fact, not supposition.  

Words continue to have great power, and can be used to cause great harm.  That is ultimately the underlying lesson here - and perhaps we have a precedent here that can be used in the future when other public figures use their position to foment hate and fear. 

Understanding Alberta Separatist Claims As Gaslighting

The arguments that the Alberta separatists make to justify their positions are carefully crafted to seem almost reasonable, while at the same time are actually distorting the picture entirely to support their claims of "legitimate grievances".  This is a form of gaslighting which Albertans are being subjected to on a scale most have never seen before.  Gaslighting is using manipulation to cause someone to question their own perception of reality (I have linked to the Wikipedia definition because it's in fairly straightforward language without getting bogged down in the details and nuances that you would find in more psychological analyses of the topic.) 

I think it's worth taking apart some of their complaints and explaining exactly how they are twisting things in order to create their arguments, in the hopes of convincing people that Alberta is really hard done by in confederation.  I'll explain in more detail why I see this as a form of manipulation through distortion as we go through the example. 

The Seemingly Endless Saga Of Canada Buying New Fighter Jets

Those moderately familiar with the seemingly endless saga of replacing our aging fleet of F-18 fighters cannot be faulted for thinking "just get on with the job!".  It has been back and forth for what seems like decades.  (It has been - the F-35 development program started in the 1990s and the debates over whether Canada should buy them have been raging since 2010 or so.  

That was then, this is now.  In 2010, the US was a reliable partner for trade and defence.  Then January 2025 happened, and all that changed. The geopolitical context shifted as the US entered Trump's second term as president.  Alliances that had been tried and true since WWII were called into question, the US started throwing up trade barriers everywhere, and so on.  

Suddenly, Canada's earlier decision to replace the F-18s with F-35s fell into question, and in fact our whole approach to defence did.  An ally we had long looked at as "a good neighbour" suddenly was making noises about annexing Canada.

The parameters of the decision around the F-35 changed enormously.  Concerns about everything from parts supply and maintenance to rumours of Washington having a "kill switch" available that rightly spooked a lot of people.  The newly elected government in Canada, led by Mark Carney committed to reviewing the F-35 decision.  

In response, Sweden's Saab group sweetened its offer around the Gripen - promising partnership and helping Canada set up a military aviation manufacturing capacity, where the F-35 deal ultimately restricts Canada's ability to service its own aircraft, with regular servicing having to be done by Lockheed Martin, and there is no visibility for Canada into the software systems that manage the aircraft.  Suddenly, even if the F-35 is the technologically superior aircraft, it is no longer clear that it would be suitable for Canada, especially if Canada finds itself in a standoff with its neighbour.  

Amid the backdrop of negotiations with the US for a renewed CUSMA, ongoing threats from the Trump administration, and the Canadian government reaching out around the world to forge new trade agreements outside of the multilateral agreements like CUSMA, Canadians are getting increasingly concerned about decisions that would tie us more closely to the US.

Like the Auto Strategy that the government released a few weeks ago, the new Military Strategy released this week marks a sharp turn away from the existing structures that depend so much on the US.  It's an ambitious plan, one that will shift Canada's economic and military posture significantly (and one that will no doubt make certain corners of the Trump Administration angry).  

Unjust Laws and Restricting Rights Unnecessarily

Alberta has already begun restricting transgender rights, and in the wake of the shooting in Tumbler Ridge this week,  I fully expect that the UCP government will move to further restrict transgender rights in Alberta - there's already plenty of noise on various conservative discussion forums demanding "action", and if there's one thing that Danielle Smith is good at, it is doing her party's bidding when it is at its most loathsome.  

I have spent considerable time analyzing those laws, and at best they are ill-thought out reactionary responses to imagined problems rather than actual issues.  However, in a country where politicians can legitimately override rights by invoking the Notwithstanding clause, what can we the public do to undo the damage done by a reactionary government?  

Correlation Fallacy and the Tumbler Ridge Tragedy

Yesterday, a person in Tumbler Ridge, BC went into the high school and shot a large number of people, killing 6 at the school, and injuring dozens more.  This is after they had shot and killed two family members in their home. 

Today, we learned that the shooter was a young transgender woman who had dropped out of high school a few years ago.  Predictably, our friends over at The Western Standard jumped on this to argue that somehow transgender identity is therefore intrinsically dangerous. (I won't link to material I consider overt hate literature - a series of screen copies will be provided at the end of this which will contain the offending column).  

The writer, Christopher Oldcorn, has been carrying the "anti-transgender banner" for Western Standard since at least 2022, possibly earlier.  His working thesis here seems to be "well, because the shooter was transgender, clearly gender affirming care doesn't work", or something to that effect. 

Poilievre Gets an 87% Approval Vote

 CPC leader Pierre Poilievre won his leadership review vote with over 87%. What does this tell us? 

I'm sure that within Liberal party ranks, there is a certain amount of cheering going on, since Poilievre is polling well behind Mark Carney for "preferred PM".  Almost certainly if an election were held today, the Conservatives would lose (again).   While in the short term, Poilievre's victory might appear to be a boon for the Liberals, I wouldn't be quite so quick to cheer.

Having replaced Jenny Byrne with Steven Outhouse, I think we can expect to see yet another round of "rebranding" applied to Poilievre's image.  His speech last night gave some hints of that beginning.  There was a definite effort not to be quite as obnoxious as he has been in the last year or two (although I doubt very much that he's going to be able to pivot away from a reflexive tendency to attack after 20 years of practice).  Branding, or image, whatever you want to call it, does matter in politics today, and conservatives have a disturbing ability to make otherwise unpalatable candidates look "good enough" to voters who don't pay close attention. 

The real issue with the CPC isn't "the leader", and it really never has been - it's what the party represents and has become over the years from its beginnings as the prairie rump "Reform Party" through to its current form.  Reform was always a party of extremes - weirdly authoritarian and libertarian at the same time, and substantially driven by a bunch of Social Conservative (they aren't really conservative) grievance groups.  

As the party expanded eastward, it ran into a number of roadblocks where they just couldn't seem to make headway - especially in Ontario and Quebec.  That led to a shift and some rebranding efforts that tried to paper over the perception that the party was dominated by Christian Fundamentalists from the Prairies.  Fast forward through the merger with the old Progressive Conservative Party to today, and we need to spend some quality time reading through the party policy book and the policy motions.  

Unfortunately, in these documents lies a ton of policies that the party doesn't talk about - policies which ultimately are designed to implement many aspects of the socially conservative (regressive) state that Prairie Evangelicals have been pushing towards for decades.  Journalist Marci McDonald documented it really well in her book "The Armageddon Factor".  Although the book is now somewhat dated, it does document much of the drive for the religious right to gain control over the Conservative Party.  

Now, in part, we need to understand that when people are accusing the CPC of having a "hidden agenda", it's not that the agenda is "really hidden" - it's well known and documented.  However, when politicians sit there and say "oh, I won't do _THAT_", they're engaging in deceit.  Poilievre has done this repeatedly on the abortion topic, only his party keeps these topics alive in their policy declaration.  

In more recent history, in Alberta we've seen this deceit used by the UCP under Danielle Smith.  So much of what she said she "wouldn't do" while she was running in 2023 mysteriously became legislation starting in 2024.  At this point in time, I wouldn't trust any party that refuses to talk about any topic that's in their policy manual.  

This is fundamentally the core of where Poilievre has a problem - he is at the helm of a party that I characterize as half a dozen angry badgers in a trench coat.  No amount of rebranding is going to address the fundamental issue that the CPC has major players in it that have "views" that are radically divergent from those of most Canadians. 

I take last night's confidence vote in Poilievre as a sign that the CPC has turned inward.  They aren't receptive to the opinions of the broader public, rather they have decided that they are going to attempt to deceive Canadian voters into electing them so they can impose an agenda that is regressive at best.

So, Trump Wants To Decertify Canadian-Built Aircraft

 So, the latest Trumpian temper tantrum is that the US will decertify Bombardier built aircraft.  On the surface, this is as ridiculous as it seems.  Ostensibly, this temper tantrum is over Canada having not (yet) certified several newer models from Bombardier rival Gulfstream.  But is it really?

Consider the following:  only 4 days ago, US Ambassador to Canada Hoekstra was making threats over the purchase of F-35s, and an orchestrated defence of the F-35 started last fall.  The Americans started sweating over the F-35 sale to Canada quite a while ago, and Sweden/Saab's offer presents Canada with the ability to reboot its aerospace industry in a way that we haven't seen since the cancellation of the Avro Arrow project.  

Now, here's where Trump's outburst may in fact finalize Canada's pivot away from the F-35 - let me explain: