If readers are tired of hearing about former Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld, I understand.
He is an exhausting human being, but he’s still making news as his defamation lawsuit against former B.C. Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) president Glen Hansman is finally over.
Back story: A chronic school board napper, Neufeld woke up from his ideological slumber in 2017 to attack the provincial government’s program to help LGBTQ kids facing bullying and discrimination in schools.
While Neufeld has been called a bigoted homophobe by several people since then, he actually began his 2017 anti-LGBTQ rant by saying “at the risk of being labelled a bigoted homophobe…”
He was called out for his repeated homophobic comments by several people over the following months. But it was when former B.C. Teachers’ Federation president Glen Hansman did it, that Neufeld got really upset.
So he sued for defamation, a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC). In its decision posted on May 19, the highest court in the country declared that Hansman’s comments in 2018 calling Neufeld’s statements bigoted, transphobic and hateful were fair comment.
The SCC decided that the B.C. Supreme Court judge who dismissed Neufeld’s defamation lawsuit in the first place was correct in finding that the suit had the effect of suppressing debate on matters of public interest. And when the B.C. Court of Appeals overturned that decision, it erred.
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“(The original judge) determined the value in protecting Mr. Hansman’s expression outweighed the harm Mr. Neufeld likely suffered.”
Writing for the majority on the SCC, Justice Andromache Karakatsanis said Neufeld suffered limited harm as he continued to express his views and even won re-election a year later.
“(T)he closer the expression lies to the core values of (freedom of expression), including truth-seeking, participating in political decision-making and diversity in the forms of self-fulfillment and human flourishing, the greater the public interest in protecting it” Karakatsanis concluded, stating that Hansman’s speech aligned with these values.
Hansman’s application that was originally allowed by the B.C. Supreme Court was under the Protection of Public Participation Act (PPPA), so-called anti-SLAPP legislation. It was decided that the protection of Hansman’s expression outweighed the harm done to Neufeld.
Using the the PPPA’s public interest weighing exercise, the SCC determined the original judge was correct and the appeal court was not.
“In (this) case, Hansman’s expression is counter‑speech motivated by a desire to promote tolerance and respect for a marginalized group in society,” the SCC found. “Hansman spoke out to counter expression he perceived to be untrue, prejudicial towards transgender and other 2SLGBTQ+ individuals, and potentially damaging to transgender youth.”
All but one SCC judge concurred with the majority decision.
Justice Suzanne Côté dissented, writing: “The question is not whether the court agrees with either party’s expression, but whether Neufeld’s action should be dismissed at this early stage of the proceeding. It should not. Neufeld deserves to have his day in court.”
Neufeld himself is not without a history of insulting others publicly. His libels and slanders are many.
In 2020, the school board censured Neufeld after he made social media posts questioning the gender identity of Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s top doctor. He said she is transgender, and therefore can’t be trusted.
That same year he came under fire when he used an ableist slur to insult Chilliwack Progress reporter Jessica Peters, the newspaper’s publisher Tara Hiebert, and yours truly. He called us the R-word on Twitter prompting outrage from disability advocates. I exchanged several messages with former CTV news anchor Tamara Taggart who has a son with Down syndrome. She was understandably outraged by Neufeld’s ignorance.
He also allegedly libelled current school board trustee Carin Bondar and she filed a lawsuit against him.
Bondar creates YouTube videos about biology and in one she created a mock music video based on the song Wrecking Ball. In some of it she is scantily clad, and then completely naked. Neufeld mocked it and called her a “strip-tease artist” and so Bondar filed a lawsuit against him.
Oddly, however, when The Progress reported on the lawsuit and included a still image from her public video that she likes to share, Bondar called me a misgoynist. So there is more than enough libel to go around.
With that case still before the courts, I’m sorry to say it, but it’s like this isn’t the last you’ll hear about Barry Neufeld.
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