CHILLIWACK, British Columbia (LifeSiteNews) — A former Canadian school board trustee has been released after being sent to jail for criticizing a trustee who posted sexual content online.
On November 24, former Chilliwack, British Columbia trustee Barry Neufeld turned himself in at the Chilliwack Law Courts after he was unable to pay fines for criticizing the election of school trustee Carin Bondar, who made sexually explicit “science” videos.
“I am willing to do time in jail if it brings awareness to what’s happening to children,” Neufeld told media before he turned himself in.
Neufeld’s legal battles began after a 2022 recorded Zoom meeting with Action 4 Canada when he referred to Bondar as a “strip-tease artist.” Despite serving as a trustee for K-12 students, Bondar has publicly posted sexually explicit content online.
Her videos include “science lessons” on animal sex with vulgar and graphic depictions of sexual fetishes. In 2014, Bondar published a video of herself swinging nude on a wrecking ball that aimed to promote the idea of evolution by natural selection.
Regardless of the online evidence, the courts favored Bondar during the defamation lawsuit and ordered that Neufeld pay $45,000 in damages.
“I live on a fixed income pension, and I have a small savings account to pay back income taxes,” Neufeld wrote in his newsletter. “For the past year, Bondar’s lawyer has been trying to summon me to a hearing to force me to pay $35,000 General Damages, $10,000 punitive damages, plus $8,703.75 of her expenses to try and serve me. She is demanding that I pay a total of $53,703.75. I have no way of paying this.”
As a result, on October 27, Justice Anita Chan of the Supreme Court of British Columbia ordered Neufeld to turn himself in to jail. Neufeld was sentenced to one day at Ford Mountain Correctional Centre.
In an interview with Rebel News, Neufeld revealed that he has been ordered to return on December 1 “with all my financial records so they could try and find out how to get $53,000 out of me.”
“After faithfully serving the cause of public education for over a quarter of a century, activists like Bondar are determined to ruin me financially,” Neufeld wrote in his letter before his arrest.
“But my only motivation has always been to protect children from sexualization and irreversible damage to their bodies,” he continued. “I believe educators should prioritize academic excellence, not ideological indoctrination.”
Neufeld first came under attack in 2017 when he disagreed with the Chilliwack school board’s efforts to push gender ideology on children.
“At the risk of being labelled a bigoted homophobe, I have to say that I support traditional family values and I agree with the College of Pediatricians that letting little children choose to change gender is nothing short of child abuse,” Neufeld wrote in a Facebook post at the time, sparking the subsequent controversy about whether he should be allowed around children.
Glen Hansman, then-president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, called Neufeld “bigoted” and “transphobic” and said the trustee had “promoted hatred,” “exposed (trans people) to hatred” and “tip-toed quite far into hate speech” and was “continuing to spread hate about LGBTQ people.”