We are thick-skinned but everyone is picking on us: Teacher Rob Bogunovic's testimony at BCTF v. Barry Neufeld human rights tribunal
Looking back on some unreported elements from the BC Human Rights Tribunal's ongoing hearing into Neufeld's alleged hate speech
The case of the BC Teachers Federation versus Barry Neufeld began back in November. There were several day in December 2024, resumed on Feb. 24, 2025, and then on March 10, 2025.
Dec. 4, 2024 • BC Human Rights Tribunal • BCTF v. Barry Neufeld
Getting personally accused by conspiracy theorist and high school teacher Rob Bogunovic of being in cahoots with the Chilliwack Teachers Association (CTA) and LGBTQ activists to pick on poor ol’ Barry Neufeld was not on my bingo card this day.
But here we are.
The most amazing and ironic hypocrisy was Neufeld's lawyer James Kitchen steering Bogunovic to claim the LGBTQ community who don't want to continue to be treated like crap are whiny complainers, while he and Neufeld are tough and “thick-skinned” in the face of public attacks by the Marxist union, left-wing trustees and the biased local newspaper editor who was mean to Barry.
"The news was hostile to Barry and his ilk," Bogunovic told the BC Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT) hearing.
"They were spreading hatred his way. That was what some individuals were reacting to: the poor treatment of Barry, which they could see tangibly on the front pages of the newspaper. It was a very vitriolic climate. Every week there was a front-page story in the newspaper.”
"The BCTF and CTA and The Progress newspaper and other activists focused on Barry he became the centre of a firestorm.... It seemed like a co-ordinated effort to make social conservatives intimidated and afraid."
The "thick-skinned" Bogunovic also complained about "the price I had to pay as a fairly well-known social conservative." Thick-skinned, maybe, but Bogo kind of disappeared from the public sphere after he was called out for his anti-science position in 2021, showing up only to have protest meals at Rolly's in Hope, a restaurant proudly defying the mandates.
If you aren't familiar, Bogunovic's name has been in the media a few times over the last decade for a few very right wing reasons. You know, normal conservative stuff such as his claims that: unions are part of a grand Marxist agenda; immigrants are to blame for housing prices; and vaccinations are a conspiracy to poison you.
A few Bogunovic highlights
• 2018: When the BCTF and the CTA filed the human rights complaint against Neufeld, as a member of the union, that got Bogunovic's hackles up. He applied to get out of paying union dues because “trade unionism is a major part of the grand Marxist agenda.”
He said being forced to be in a union as a teacher meant he had to partake in “a repressive agenda that is irreconcilable to my religious and political views.”
Bogunovic mentioned Neufeld's anti-LGBTQ Facebook post and the subsequent battle, painting the former trustee as something of a martyr or a prophet.
“The controversy pitted a lone Christian voicing his support for traditional family values against the media, the government, public-sector trade unions, a mob fueled by outrage spewing hate and bile, and all of them were calling Neufeld the bully.”
• 2019: Bogunovic was the candidate for the moribund People’s Party of Canada (PPC) in the federal election in 2019 in which he received 3.3 per cent of the vote. His main topic of interest was blaming the cost of housing on foreigners moving to Canada from other countries.
• 2021: He was back for the PPC in 2021. While he managed to garner just seven per cent of ballots cast, which was actually better than most other PPCers, he got ink because his anti-vaxxer status helped derail the only scheduled all-candidate meeting of the campaign. Incumbent MP, Prince Mark Strahl, who has zero incentive to appear in public, talk to other candidates, or debate issues, pulled a slick move to get out of going. Because of the pandemic, everyone in attendance was required to be vaccinated, with unvaccinated Rob Bogunovax not allowed to attend, Strahl found a way to kill the meeting: “While I am eligible to appear in person, I will only do so if all candidates running in this election appear on the same platform.”
Back to Bogunovic at the BCHRT. Neufeld's lawyer's leaded him towards claims of victimhood with his line of questioning: "The powerful were coming after Barry?"
"The trustee has less power than the editor of The Chillliwack Progress," he said, adding that I helped decide who would win elections.
"You could see who the paper wanted you to vote for."
Really? In the community where the Strahl empire goes unchecked federally, and certain church-goers do as they are told and obediently elect right-wing religious ideologues, such as the Strahls and John Les and Heather Maahs and Laurie Throness and Barry Neufeld and Darrell Furgason and Silvia Dyck and etc., we decided who won elections? Hardly.
But after that, the most amusing part was that despite Barry evoking fascism, suggesting Paraguay and Russia have good LGBTQ policies, comparing SOGI to residential schools and eugenics, claiming Canada's top doctor is trans so shouldn't be trusted, and on and on, Bogunovic wrapped it all up: "Barry's comments were satirical."
Oh, sorry then. It was all in good fun.
Relying on pseudoscience to defend a deplorable view
In addition to Jordan Peterson, in defending Barry Neufeld's persistent anti-LGBTQ comments when he was on the stand in December, Chilliwack Secondary School teacher Rob Bogunovic repeatedly invoked Kenneth Zucker, a man generally shunned by the mental-health community because of his decades of promoting conversion therapy.
Zucker was psychologist-in-chief at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, but was fired and his gender identity clinic shut down after several complaints in 2015.
To give you a sense of Zucker's pseudoscience and disturbing views that a high-school social studies teacher Rob Bugonovic is a fan of, Zucker forced gender-diverse children into reparative therapy to "fix" their behaviour. Hundreds of children were brought to his clinic and, not creepy at all, he took photos of all of them.
In one particularly crazy “study,” Zucker wanted to see how “physically attractive” these children’s faces and upper torsos were. Adults were shown images of children in Zucker’s care and asked to rate their attractiveness.
“Boys with gender identity disorder were judged to be more attractive than were the clinical control boys," Zucker concluded.
Zucker repeated with other children a few years later, concluding that “girls with gender identity disorder had significantly less attractive ratings than the normal control girls for the traits attractive, beautiful, and pretty.”
Seems like really important work being done there.
Both studies were published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, the journal Zucker now edits.
Three more oddities
Revisiting Barry Neufeld's BC Human Rights Tribunal hearing with CSS teacher Rob Bogunovic on the stand, three unusual or surprising (to me) things that he said and one that was said about him.
1. Multiple times in his testimony in defence of Neufeld, Bogunovic told the tribunal that he has autism.
"I, like her, have identified as having autism," he said in reference to a teacher who was not on the witness list. I'm sure Bogunovic wouldn't lie about this, but where out of the clear blue sky does this come? I don't think this has come up in the past regarding his many controversies over the years.
2. Even stranger, before he first mentioned that he has autism, and despite his fervent defence of Neufeld's alleged homophobia, Bogunovic claimed that he is in fact part of the LGBTQIA2S+ community.
Immediately after he addressed the issue of "power" in the community by stating that Neufeld had less power than yours truly ("a trustee has less power than the editor of The Chilliwack Progress"), apropos of nothing, in addition to being autistic he said he was "asexual and aromantic." What the? I know what "asexual" means and we are not talking about bacteria or jellyfish, this is feeling no sexual attraction to others. I had to look up "aromantic" (basically the opposite "a romantic") and it's on the spectrum of asexual. There is even a flag for him, one of the many LGBTQ+ flags, this one representing "aroace". The first two people I told about this testimony suggested that's what an incel might say.
So Bogunovic told the world he is autistic, asexual and aromantic.
3. Maybe even strangest of all was two days after Bogo's AAA testimony. Barry Neufeld was asked by his lawyer about the three teachers who were witnesses, two of whom were gay and one identified as trans. I did not catch what the connection was, but Barry said “Rob Bogunovic’s wife thought she was suffering from gender dysphoria but it was multiple sclerosis.”
Again, what the actual what? Neufeld's pseudo-science speculation was taken to new heights as he suggested that someone having symptoms of an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system might interpret it as, "Maybe I'm a man in a woman's body?"
The testimony from these two and Darrell Furgason was all just so bizarre and riddled with outrageous claims and logical fallacies.
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