This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By David Thomas, March 31, 2026
When I became the Chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in 2014, I said some things I was not supposed to say. I made the observation that human rights tribunals had a bad reputation. This wasn’t received well.
In my first Annual Report to Parliament, I asserted that “Discrimination is not widely accepted in Canada. It is not acceptable to most Canadians to even hear a suggestion of prohibited discrimination, let alone engage in it.” I still believe that remains true today.
That’s not to say that no discrimination ever happens, and that is why human rights tribunals should exist. Like maintaining our good health, we need to remain vigilant to keep prohibited discrimination at bay.
However, in that same report, I warned that our preservation relied on us making credible decisions. “We have a duty to make decisions that reflect broad Canadian values so that our work continues to be respected and valued.”
Human rights tribunals were set up to keep discrimination cases outside of the courts, probably reflecting the idea that these matters were not as serious as criminality. The way the tribunals were originally set up supported the idea that complaints could be heard by a panel of non-lawyers over a few hours, decided upon quickly, and a decision rendered days later. Remedies could include an order to cease prohibited discrimination, pay restitution and perhaps a small penalty for injury to dignity.
Now it takes years to get a case through the system. Most provinces have lifted damage limits, and awards in the tens of thousands of dollars for injury to dignity are routinely made. These same administrative tribunals have now been used to put forward class-action style cases resulting in massive awards, including one which led to a settlement negotiated by the government for a total sum of $23.3 billion.
There have also been absurd cases, like the transgender woman who filed a complaint after being denied a scrotum waxing at various beauty salons.
However, much of the human rights nonsense seldom makes the news. Many frivolous cases are settled at mediation where respondents are faced with paying money to make the complaint go away, or paying much more in legal costs to defend themselves at a hearing. Even if they win their case, they will rarely be able to recover any costs from the complainant.
I mediated about 300 cases for the Canadian and B.C. human rights tribunals. At times I felt like an agent of a state-controlled extortion ring, persuading respondents to pay money to settle claims I knew they would never lose at a hearing. I kept track in my 12 years of doing this work. In my opinion, more than half of the complaints had no merit.
There are so many cases that have strayed from what I referred to as broad Canadian values. There was the Ontario father who was told that discrimination laws don’t apply to his son because he is white. There have been hate speech cases which have imposed unclear rules about what you can and cannot say. Businesses have been fined tens of thousands of dollars because of pronoun disputes amongst their employees.
The most recent controversy comes from the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal decision in B.C. Teachers Federation v. Neufeld. Barry Neufeld was an elected school trustee and a vocal online critic of the sexual orientation and gender identity curriculum — known as SOGI 123 — being provided to B.C.’s K-12 students since 2017. Neufeld’s online criticism resulted in the tribunal finding him guilty of hate speech and being ordered to pay $750,000 in damages for “injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect” to an entire class of people he didn’t directly work with or even know.
Far from being a minor administrative matter designed to stay out of the courts, decisions like Neufeld suggest financial ruin could await anyone offending the Human Rights Code, just for doing something like challenging the accepted narrative on transgender issues.
It always occurred to me, how many times do certain politicians need to hear about these types of cases, straying far away from broad Canadian values, before they get to a point where they say, enough is enough?
It should not be surprising that recently in British Columbia, an opposition member of the legislature proposed a bill (entitled Human Rights Code Repeal Act) to entirely eliminate the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal and the B.C. Human Rights Commission.
The first reading of the bill was supported by the Conservative caucus, including one candidate for leadership for the party. Other leadership candidates have not dared to say out loud that they wish to shut down the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, but their criticism of the Neufeld decision and others is starting to send the message that major reform, if not outright repeal, is on the horizon.
Human rights adjudicators have an obligation to be neutral decision-makers, giving as much of a fair hearing to the respondent as the complainant. Their role is not that of an activist who wishes to push the progressive envelope. It is important that ordinary Canadians buy into and value our work. If we push too far, the day will come when the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater and the whole system will get tossed.
David Thomas is a lawyer and mediator in British Columbia and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He was an adjudicator for the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal for 10 years, serving as its chairperson in Ottawa from 2014 to 2021. He was also a mediator for the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal for three years.
