Last chance if you want to join B.C.'s most histrionic-filled school board

Deadline Friday to join Chilliwack byelection, whether you want to perpetuate divisive drama or finally make school board boring again (i.e. do the job)

(*Edited Jan. 27, 2025 - Clarified that Bartel is not the ongoing executive director of Chilliwack Pride. She quit after the event in 2024 - PJH)

Today, Friday, Jan. 24, 2025, is the last day to get your nomination package in for the Chilliwack School Board byelection to fill the vacant seat created when former trustee Heather Maahs stepped down after winning the provincial election as a BC Conservative.

The race looks like it will come down to former MLA and federal Conservative policy advisor Laurie Throness who was kicked out of the (extremely conservative) BC Liberal Party for being too conservative, and three-time DPAC chair and inaugural Chilliwack Pride executive director Katie Bartel.

Some people have asked me if I was going to run to fill the vacant seat after my tongue-in-cheek Facebook post declaring as such. (Note: I did use the phrase "tongue-in-cheek" in my post.)

Do I wanna discuss public school policy with Carin Bondar and Richard Procee or pull my fingernails out with pliers? Neither, thanks. I am obviously not entering the byelection race for half a dozen reasons that aren't important.

What is interesting, if agonizing, is the political extremes we have endured over recent years, a divisiveness far more extreme than anything we have ever seen at city hall or any other level of government.

Those calm and measured school board days with trustee Paul McManus as board chair and trustees like Walt Krahn and Bob Patterson are long gone. The last few years has involved too much sparring and name-calling between left-wing activists and right-wing ideologues.

When I kicked off my fake campaign to run in the byelection, my slogan was "Let's make school board boring again."

This itself was a reference to an op-ed I wrote in October 2022 after the last election under the headline: Dear newly elected Chilliwack trustees, please make school board boring again

We’ve all seen the circus since former trustee Barry Neufeld drove his clown car off the road in 2017. His now infamous anti-SOGI tirade triggered school board candidates on the extremes of the political spectrum to get involved and hijack the board, making a mockery of the institution, leading to defamation lawsuits and human rights complaints. On the latter, the case of BCTF v. Barry Neufeld is ongoing, adjourned over the holidays set to resume in February.

From anachronistic Darrell "Young-Earth-Creationist" Furgason on the far right to the precious Carin "Anyone-Who-Questions-Me-Is-A-Misogynist" Bondar on the far left, the drama runs deep.

But for the vast majority of the general public, including parents and teachers, it has worn thin.

I joked in my Facebook post that voters in this byelection will have a choice between Pride and Prejudice. Katie is an active parent of children with diverse needs and she has managed the Chilliwack Pride Festival since it started. Laurie is not a parent, was MLA, and lost his last bid for re-election after being kicked out of the BC Liberals at the last minute due to his repeated religious extremist comments.

On the right, I hope Throness has learned the lesson from the demise of Neufeld and Furgason that these extreme evangelical religious perspectives on school board issues are not representative of the community. To paraphrase the much-maligned, if accurate, Trudeau expression, Neufeld's nonsense was "the unacceptable views of a fringe minority.”

On the left, I hope Bartel will not carry in the tradition of some progressive trustees, Carin Bondar and Willow Reichelt in particular, who all too often take the Neufeld/Furgason bait, ring the woke cancel culture alarm, and respond to what should have been nothing more than the irrelevant ramblings of an angry man on the way out the door.

Some of the above was in my Dec. 18, 2024, Facebook post. I pointed out that Barry is gone. Heather is gone. And while Carin and Reichelt and others with whom Barry/Heather/Darrell clashed on the left have taken over, I actually think it’s time to get back to the centre and stop talking about topics school boards have no business wasting time on.

What was astounding to me was that in between laughing emojis and comments of support to my tongue-in-cheek campaign, was evidence of then-school board chair Reichelt resorting to school-yard behaviour by telling her mommy on me. And boy did I hear it from mommy.

"Katie Bartel is being endorsed by almost everyone I know who is on the progressive side of education," Reichelt's mother Bev Duncan commented on my post. "You could have put your support behind her. By deciding to run you will probably split the vote and Maahs will likely be replaced with Throness and that would be a nightmare. But perhaps the people who loved Heather Maahs, Darryl Ferguson, and Barry Neufeld will love you too and gladly vote for you and you’ll split the right-wing wacko vote. That way we will be sure to have the very qualified Katie Bartel as our newest trustee."

My reply: "My mistake, I guess I wasn’t invited to the progressive coronation."

Then when Duncan realized my candidacy was tongue-in-cheek, she wrote: "Ah, so this is just [sic] very non-funny joke filled with mysogyny [sic] and denigration of our progressive trustees, got it. Sorry I was bamboozled."

And therein lies the rub.

The radical right gets its fair share of criticism from yours truly and others, but when one dares to criticize anything by someone such as Carin Bondar, or when someone who is progressive dares to get in the way of the left-wing decision-makers, they eat their own.

I tried to get some boring back in the school board, but apparently high-school drama is too much fun for some people. Willow’s mom said I’m a misogynist (for some inexplicable reason) and I'm not funny. She gave me the what for and let me know that all the cool kids want someone else to be the only possible choice to replace the outgoing religious right-wing trustee who stepped down.

I’m not allowed to play. If you need me I’ll be sulking in the corner. 

In all seriousness, however, I do hope people appreciate the irony behind attempted bullying by a sitting school trustee's mother, a trustee who is a strong and vocal supporter of the anti-bullying classroom resource known as SOGI-123.

If you do have the stomach to get involved in these histrionics, today (Jan. 24, 2025) at 4 p.m. is the end of the nomination period, the last time to get your nomination package in to city hall.

The campaign period runs Saturday, Feb. 1, 2025, to election day on Saturday, March 1, 2025.

The names of the candidates will be posted on the city's website today at 4 p.m.

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Paul J. Henderson
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