This article originally appeared in the Quillette. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By David Thomas, July 17, 2026
Earlier this year, a human rights tribunal ordered a former school trustee in the Canadian province of British Columbia, Barry Neufeld, to pay a C$750,000 penalty. Tribunal officials concluded that certain statements Neufeld had made, protesting the inclusion of LGBT-related content in the school curriculum, had exhibited “hallmarks of hate.”
“Transpeople are, by definition, people ‘whose gender identity does not align with the sex assigned to them at birth,’” the tribunal declared. “If a person elects not to ‘believe’ that gender identity is separate from sex assigned at birth, then they do not ‘believe’ in transpeople. This is a form of existential denial.”
Even by Canadian standards, the judgment appears extreme. And the backlash has included a nascent effort to abolish human rights tribunals entirely. For now, Canadian human rights tribunals aren’t going anywhere, but if outrageous judgments such as this one become the norm, such an outcome might be inevitable.
When I moved to Ottawa in 2014 to become the Chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT), I knew my first priority had to be the rehabilitation of the institution’s reputation. Shortly before I arrived, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper had repealed the hate speech provisions in the Canadian Human Rights Act, the legislation under which the CHRT operates. A number of high-profile hate-speech cases had diminished the reputation of the CHRT and similarly mandated organisations. We were no longer getting buy-in from large swathes of the Canadian public.
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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.
