Danielle Smith’s Alberta referendum on October 19, 2026, targets federal immigration policies, proposing stricter controls—like 12-month residency requirements for non-permanent immigrants and fees for healthcare/education—to curb financial strain on taxpayers. Michelle Rempel-Garner warns the Liberals’ system risks deporting 3 million visa-expired migrants while Barry Newfeld fights a $750,000 fine for opposing gender ideology, calling it a "toxic" precedent. Both cases reflect rising public backlash against federal overreach and ideological enforcement, signaling a potential constitutional showdown over immigration and free speech. [Automatically generated summary]
Danielle Smith sets a new standard for immigration reform with her five powerful questions that she's going to put to a referendum of Albertans in October.
Then we'll ask Michelle Rempel-Garner, the federal conservative immigration critic, what she thinks about it.
Huge show today.
Thank you for tuning in.
But first, I want you to get the video version of this podcast by going to RebelNewsPlus.com.
It's eight bucks a month, which may not sound like a lot to you, but it sure adds up for us.
It's how we pay our bills, because we don't take a dime from the government, and it shows.
Tonight, Danielle Smith sets a new standard for immigration reform, and Michelle Rempel-Gardner gives us her view on it.
It's February 23rd, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious boobug.
Well, for decades, immigration was something you weren't really allowed to talk about, other than to nod along and say everything was fine.
I remember even the Conservative Party of Canada, in, I think it was the 2021 election, the leader, when grilled by Rosemary Barton, said, oh, he just agrees with everything Justin Trudeau says.
Can we please move on?
It was terrifying.
There was this political consensus that you couldn't challenge mass immigration, but I think that's falling apart.
And last night, I think we heard one of the most bracing challenges to the immigration status quo ever by someone in a position of power.
Without further ado, let me play for you an excerpt from Danielle Smith's address to the province last night, where she said there's going to be referendum questions on immigration.
And don't go away because after I play those, I'm going to bring on Michelle Rempel-Garner, the Conservative Party of Canada's immigration critic, to get her reaction to the declarations.
Actually, not really declarations, because it's putting it to the people, to the referendum questions of Alberta.
Here, take a look.
The changes we need to make to immigration are a significant departure from the status quo.
And therefore, I am seeking a referendum mandate from Albertans to implement them.
On October 19th, 2026, we will hold a provincial referendum primarily focused on how Albertans want our government to deal with the issue of immigration, as well as steps we can take as a province to strengthen our constitutional and fiscal position within a United Canada.
These were, far and away, the issues most strongly identified by Albertans during last year's Alberta Next Panel town halls and online submissions.
And in my view, it is time to act on them.
The fact is, Alberta taxpayers can no longer be asked to continue to subsidize the entire country through equalization and federal transfers, permit the federal government to flood our borders with new arrivals, and then give free access to our most generous in the country social programs to anyone who moves here.
This is not only grossly unfair to Alberta taxpayers, but also financially crippling and undercuts the quality of our health care, education, and other social services.
The October 19th referendum will therefore include the following questions.
Number one, do you support the government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purpose of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration, and ensuring Albertans have first priority to new employment opportunities?
Number two, do you support the government of Alberta introducing a law mandating only Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and individuals with an Alberta-approved immigration status will be eligible for provincially funded programs such as health, education, and other social services?
Number three, assuming that all citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for social support programs as they do now, do you support the government of Alberta introducing a law requiring all individuals with a non-permanent legal immigration status to be resident in Alberta for at least 12 months before qualifying for any provincially funded social support programs?
Number four, assuming that all citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for public health care and education as they do now, do you support the government of Alberta charging a reasonable fee or premium to individuals with a non-permanent immigration status living in Alberta for their and their families' use of the health care and education systems?
Number five, do you support the government of Alberta introducing a law requiring individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate, or citizenship card, to be eligible to vote in a provincial election?
There you have it.
Now, just to clarify, I sort of misspoke when I said that was her manifesto.
No, those are the questions that are going to be put to Albertans in a vote.
But if any poll over the last 10 years is accurate, I think each of those questions will be resoundingly approved by the people of Alberta.
That's my prognostication.
Joining us now via Skype is the official opposition critic for immigration, also known as the Shadow Cabinet Minister.
Michelle Rampel Gardner joins us now.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
You're so busy.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, as always.
Very interesting comments by Danielle Smith, the Premier of Alberta.
And to put it to the people is quite a dramatic move because I think that lets the people be the bad guy for challenging the consensus, not Danielle Smith herself.
Well, like, look, I'll just speak from the federal perspective.
It's been incredibly frustrating to watch the Liberals completely ruin Canada's immigration system for everybody, for Canadians, for people who want to come to Canada to build a better life and play by the rules.
And, you know, they've brought too many people in too fast for housing, health care, and jobs to keep up.
That's just the reality.
And it's not just Premier Smith that is expressing concerns about that fact.
It's premiers of all different political stripes across the country.
And I think what you're seeing now, and not just in Alberta, is provincial governments challenging the lack of federal leadership in fixing the situation that they created, right?
We have an extremely weak immigration minister right now.
And that's why the federal conservatives, we've been putting forward, I know I've been on your show before, a lot of really bold and common sense proposals to restore order to Canada's immigration system.
Because yeah, like we haven't seen any action or even acknowledgement from the Liberal government that they led Canada to this place.
And now, of course, you see provincial governments, advocacy groups, and of course, official opposition saying, look, there needs to be action.
And now it's kind of like over to you, Mark Carney.
You know, constitutionally immigration is a federal matter.
Obviously, it has to do with our borders.
So for a province to wade into it is interesting, but she's not saying that she can stop immigration.
What she can say is the things that are within the provincial jurisdiction, health and education and provincial voting, she can take a stand on.
Do you support her proposed use of those provincial powers to alter how mass immigration affects Alberta?
Well, you know, again, I'd point to other provinces as well, too.
Actually, municipalities.
You know, Olivia Chow, hardly a conservative, proposed having to raise property taxes in response to the number of bogus asylum claimants that were flooding into the greater Toronto area over the last several years under the federal liberal government's, you know, abysmal immigration policies.
Then you had, you know, we famously had the immigration minister in front of committee this year, and she said, well, I don't consider health care when setting immigration levels.
She said something to that effect.
She sort of implied it.
And of course, health care is a provincial responsibility.
So when you have a federal government taking policy that's within their jurisdiction, but that massively impacts provincial jurisdiction, like healthcare, for example, or to a certain extent, housing, you are going to see people push back.
And so, again, I would just say how I've tried to address this issue in my role as shadow minister is come up with concrete solutions to see the federal government reverse some of these policies that have led to this sort of tension.
Like, you know, we talked about birthright citizenship.
We've talked about major reforms to the asylum system so that people who are abusing the asylum system can't get better health care benefits than Canadians do, for example.
I could literally spend two hours talking to you about the proposals that we've put forward.
But I think that you are going to see not just like, you know, I know that Premier Smith is going to get a lot of attention because she's a conservative premier talking about immigration, but frankly, it's been liberal premiers as well, too.
And it's incumbent upon the liberal government and Mark Carney to take some of the suggestions that conservatives have put forward at the federal level to reform the system, but also massively bring down immigration levels, come up with a plan to remove the nearly 3 million people who have expired or expiring visas this year.
Temporary needs to mean temporary.
And yeah, it's a giant mess, but we will continue as a federal conservative party to push for reforms to bring back order and fairness.
You know, I saw an interesting debate online the other day between Candace Malcolm, the boss of Juneau News, and Jason Kenney, the former Premier of Alberta and former federal immigration minister.
And I think he was fairly well regarded as an immigration minister.
He cracked down on some fraud, even though I would say the gross numbers were large.
And they were quarreling over a debate that Candace Malcolm had had with someone from the Dominion Society, which is, I don't know if it's all right.
It's sort of one degree of separation from some racist guys in Diagalon.
So I think that Jason Kenney was chiding her for that.
But she said, look, the idea of sending home millions of people whose right to be here has expired, that's not racist at all.
There's nothing racial about your visa running out and you having to go home.
And there was a real argy bargie between the two of them.
And, you know, we don't want to be racial.
We don't, you could be an outstanding, loyal, patriotic Canadian of any color of any religion.
I truly believe that.
But the idea of sending home 3 million people whose visas have expired will naturally touch people from foreign countries.
Jason Kenney felt uncomfortable with that.
Do you have the stamina and the tenacity to call for the deportation of 3 million souls, many of whom will be visible minorities, even if you're called racist, like we saw in that online debate?
Yeah, so I don't know, and I didn't follow any of the discourse that you talked about, but I'll just talk to the federal conservatives position on the issue of 2.9 million visas, either expired or expiring, on top of at least 500,000 undocumented persons in Canada.
So the principles that we've been putting forward is this.
If you are in Canada on a temporary visa, temporary means temporary under our law.
And at the end of your visa, you need to leave.
And the reality is, is the federal Liberal government brought in way too many people without a plan to ensure that they leave at the end of their visas to the point where they've even said they don't even know if they can track them.
So of course, conservatives, as we always do, are going to call for the law to be upheld.
The Immigration Refugee Protection Act, Ezra, states that when somebody's visa expires, they need to do what?
They need to leave.
That's the law.
And Conservatives, I've been calling for this since I was reappointed as shadow minister for immigration.
And, you know, it was one of the first questions I actually asked Lena Diav in the House of Commons last May was, do you have a plan to remove these people?
And the answer was, well, I don't know.
And so, of course, we're going to continue to push for that.
And frankly, I think that if the Liberals don't deal with that, we're going to have a massive level of problems.
Everything from, you know, we see AI disrupting the workforce.
I wrote about that this week.
You know, how are they setting, why are they issuing hundreds of thousands of more temporary permits when they don't have a plan to have millions of people with expired visas to leave?
And the other thing I'd say is this, Ezra.
You've seen people from across the country who are on expired visas, you know, going to different rallies and whatnot, asking to stay.
And I think the Liberals lied to them too.
The Liberals said, well, they kind of wink in a nod.
It's like, oh yeah, you can stay here, right?
And it just goes to show what a crisis of humanity this is.
But the Conservative Party's position that we are continuing to maintain is the law says that if you are here on a temporary visa, you need to leave.
And now it is incumbent upon the Liberal government to come up with a plan to get people to do so.
This is just common sense.
It's what the law says, and it's what Canadians expect.
So that's what we're focused on.
You know, I think you're right.
I think some of these folks who came over were lied to by immigration consultants.
Frankly, we're lied to by some of these diploma mills who said, come here as a student, stay forever.
And there's all sorts of tricksters showing them tricks to get around the system.
Here's what I keep trying to wrap my head around.
In the United States under Joe Biden, the number I keep hearing that came in was 13 million.
Now, they came in illegally, unlike the legal entry of students and temporary workers here.
13 million.
That country's 10 times bigger than ours.
So that would be like 1.3 million.
We're dealing with a number twice as big as the Americans.
And it's tough for them.
I mean, look at ICE going to try and find individual people.
It's causing friction in the streets.
Do you think Canadians have the stomach for that?
Or do you think it's the way Danielle Smith is suggesting, don't use muscle, just turn off the flow of the free stuff, and many of them will go home on their own.
Like ICE is a heavy-handed way, you could say, compared to just no more free stuff, which Alberta is saying.
What do you think?
Well, I guess I just look at our own context, but maybe you start, if you'll indulge me, with United Kingdom.
Questions About Crime Bill00:07:13
You know, a stat that really woke me up last year was there's a lot of debate in the United Kingdom right now on immigration.
It's, I think, the top voter issue.
I know that you covered that politics a lot, but there's actually more per capita and absolute asylum claim numbers or asylum claims made in Canada over the same period that there were in the United Kingdom.
And look at how big the debate is there, right?
Give me the reality.
Like, I think the Canadians, you know, we had a consensus on immigration that it was durable across different levels or across different political stripes for many years up until the Liberals took power about 10 years ago.
And then what happened was the Liberals brought in too many people too fast for housing, healthcare, and jobs to keep up.
So, you know, for me, I think that the average Canadian, average permanent resident, look around and go, well, wait, we have a youth jobs crisis.
Why are we still bringing in massive levels of temporary foreign workers or foreign students on work permits?
Why are we allowing bogus asylum claimants to stay in Canada for years?
Why are we allowing non-citizens who've been convicted of serious crimes in Canada to avoid deportation because they're getting more lenient sentences by judges by virtue of their immigration status?
These are all questions that Canadians have that we've I've tried to respond to with private members' bills, amendments to bills, but we've seen the Liberals just completely ignore this.
And I will say this, public opinion polling has shown that immigration is the number one issue that the Liberals are weak on.
And it's because they've refused to listen to common sense Canadians across a political stripe that are like, yeah, we will be open and welcoming to immigrants, but not in these numbers and not under these conditions.
And so restoring order through common sense proposals, I think, is something that everybody's expecting us to do and everybody's expecting Mark Carney to do.
So, you know, I don't think that anybody who's saying we don't have the housing, healthcare, and jobs to keep up with the numbers that the Liberals are allowing are unreasonable.
In fact, they're right.
And restoring that principle is something that, of course, Conservatives stand behind at the federal level.
I got two really quick snappers and then I'll let you go.
I really appreciate you spending so much time with me.
Here's the first one, which came out of left field to me, is the Liberal government proposing that we bring in foreign nationals to be our soldiers.
And I just thought the word mercenary jumped into my head.
I mean, they say there would be background checks and security checks.
What do you think of the idea of bringing in foreigners because we're not able to recruit soldiers from Canada?
Well, I think that serving in Canada's armed forces is a wonderful opportunity for any Canadian.
But I think that where the Liberal government should first be asking is why more Canadians that we have a youth jobs crisis in Canada aren't choosing the armed service or being processed into the armed service as our armed forces as an option.
That's where I would start.
I don't think that they have good answers on that.
Just as a sort of stay tuned, spoiler alert on this, I do have questions for the government on this.
But I mean, our Conservative leader, Pierre Polyev, has been very blunt about the fact that Canada needs to restore a warrior culture within the armed forces as opposed to the culture that we've seen.
And I think that's part of it.
But let's start with Canadians who want to serve.
And then I have questions on the other part.
So stay tuned on that.
Maybe an appearance for another show.
Last question, and thanks again.
You know, I agree with you that immigration is the number one issue.
And by the way, I think it impacts many other issues from housing to crime.
And by the way, crime within immigrant communities, as we see out there in Syria, for example.
Now, the liberals are smart, and if they believe in anything, they believe in winning.
And Mark Carney, who was the zero emissions guy for the longest year, he shocked everyone, including the conservatives, by scrapping the carbon tax.
The one thing you wouldn't have expected, he did to win.
And I think that was a major reason that he won, not all, but a part of it.
Do you think the liberals, if they're staring at the kind of public opinion that you've referenced that I agree in, do you think they would ever adopt your ideas?
Or do you think they're just too beholden to machine politics based on ethnic vote banks?
And this is how they talk, by the way.
Do you think this is something they could flip?
Because it's such a powerful issue.
Maybe they'll pull a carbon tax move on you.
What do you think?
Well, I will say this.
They're going to have an opportunity to answer your question in just a few short weeks.
So I have a private member's bill in front of the House of Commons.
It's a very simple one-line amendment to the criminal code that would prohibit judges from using somebody's immigration status to give them a more lenient sentence if they've been convicted of a serious crime to avoid deportation, which is a very standard practice right now.
So there is a bill in front of the House of Commons.
It's my bill.
There'll be a vote on that in just like a couple of weeks, basically.
So they're going to have an opportunity to answer your question with their feet, whether or not they're going to vote for that or not.
When we debated this bill in the House a couple of weeks ago, or sorry, last month, one of the senior liberals got up and said, well, it's not like any judge is giving special consideration to rapists.
And then I got up in the House of Commons the next day and talked about how a judge gave special consideration to somebody, a non-citizen who had raped and impregnated a 13-year-old girl twice.
So these cases are happening.
And, you know, I would just say, in answer to your question, look at, let's look and see what the liberals do in response to my common sense bill, which I think Canadians of any political stripe agree with.
Are they going to listen to very far-left special interest groups or lawyers who profit off of this system?
Or are they going to uphold the rule of law and the spirit of Canada's immigration law?
So stay tuned to that.
I would love to be on your show again after that vote happens.
And I would encourage liberals who are watching this to be like, look, if you actually care about this country, or even as Ezra said, if you care about winning, this is a no-brainer bill that I hope that they'll support.
All right.
Well, I look forward to seeing that result.
Thanks again for spending so much time with us.
Very interesting.
I agree with you.
This is the number one issue, even if it's not always on the front page, and even if it's sort of hidden or downplayed by the regime media, I think this is the number one subject of the undernews, as Mickey Kaush would say, the news that people talk about, even if they're not allowed to.
Filing For Judicial Review00:04:15
Michelle Garner-Rempel, thanks, Rempel Garner.
Thanks so much for spending time with us.
Thank you for having me.
Three quarters of a million dollars.
That's how much the former Chilliwack school trustee and staunch critic of gender ideology in school, Barry Newfeld, in British Columbia, was just slapped with by the province's human rights tribunal.
He has to pay $750,000 to the Chilliwack Teachers Association, in short, for not believing in trans people.
At least that's the allegation.
I have the full document.
It's a large ruling.
It's going to take some time to go through.
And I'll link that in the written article for this report, which you can find in the description box.
But for now, hear my interview with Mr. Neufield himself about his reaction to such a massive penalty and what's next.
Well, I was pretty sure I was going to lose because the BC Human Rights Tribunal is not a fair, just system.
And I knew that the teachers were asking for $750,000.
I was a little surprised that the tribunal went along with it.
But you know what?
It's actually turned out to be a good thing.
If they had only fined me $75,000, nobody would have been interested.
And all those protesters outside wouldn't have been yelling at me as much.
But $750,000 really made a lot of people sit up and take notice.
What the heck?
Why are they doing this to this guy?
And Twitter has gone crazy.
I've come to the attention of some major movers and shakers in the United States.
And, of course, I talked to my lawyer this morning.
This is my first public statement after it happened.
We are filing an application for a judicial review.
That's sort of like an appeal.
But, you know, when I was desperate and I didn't have any lawyer at all, my first day in front of the tribunal, the only representative I had was Carrie Simpson.
She's an activist from Langley.
And now all sorts of law firms are willing to represent me and take me on.
But, you know, when one thing I was down and out, James Kitchen believed in me and I'm sticking with him.
But there are others that are going to jump in and help.
Lisa Bildey, who represented Amy Hamm with the Nurses Professional Association, is going to help out.
Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms may be an intervener.
The Democracy Fund may be an intervener.
So we're going to have quite a team when we head in there.
But of course, the BC Teachers Federation will also have their buddies in there.
And in the past, they've been joined by Egal and probably the Attorney General of British Columbia, certainly the Human Rights Office, Kasseri Govender, I believe her name is.
So normally a judicial review of a human rights tribunal, it takes only about half a day in court.
But this file is so massive, there's so much material that my lawyer thinks it could be up to three days.
The first day, he will argue my case.
The second day, the BC Human Rights Tribunal will argue their side of it.
And the third day will be a chance for each of the interveners to put in their views on the matter.
The only thing that the court looks at is if there was any errors in law.
A Day in Court00:11:37
And I was an officer of the court for 25 years.
I could not believe the legal shoddiness that the tribunal used.
They refused to allow witnesses to speak.
They shut down testimony before it was done.
They made arbitrary decisions that had no basis in law or there was no rule book or precedent set.
They were flying by the seat of their pants.
And we could tell that they had already made up their mind what they were going to decide.
They were just going through the motions.
Now, I want to circle back to some of what seemed outrageous as part of how they came to their decision.
I'm going to actually just read from it this part here.
It says, the BC Human Rights Tribunal says that if a person elects not to believe that gender identity is separate from sex assigned at birth, then they do not believe in trans people and that this is a form of existential denialism.
What do you think when you hear that?
Well, they explained it to me very carefully.
I said very clearly, there are only two sexes, male and female.
There's nothing else.
And they said, well, then you are denying the existence of the many other genders and the non-binary people who are neither gender.
And I said, no, I believe they exist, but I think they're deluded.
They're either male or female.
And they took that as a hateful remark.
Now, what's interesting is it's exactly what the President of the United States believes and has said publicly.
So I'm in pretty good company there.
And I would say that 90% of all ordinary Canadians would believe the same.
But they are determined.
They are on the cutting edge of a new social justice movement.
And they are putting people's feelings as more important than physical safety or physical well-being.
Keeping people's feelings safe is the most important thing for them.
Well, earlier you mentioned this report.
You said the people outside there, that's because there's a protest happening outside of an event that's different.
And we're covering that separately.
But you're right.
When I asked the protesters, why are they protesting this Action for Canada event?
One of the ladies brought up your name.
Let's show that interaction.
Well, you said you were here kind of in part because you wanted me to talk to Mr. Neufeld.
What did you want me to ask him?
I wanted to ask him how is he going to pay the $750,000 ruling?
Well, I'll have to wait until the end of the month when my ship comes in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Good luck to you.
Okay.
I'll help you get a lot of donations tonight.
Oh, they're not giving anything to me.
Well, do you think that was a fair judgment?
I mean, like, 11 years ago.
Yeah, I just want to say something.
Like, 11 years ago, when someone said, hey, what's your gender?
They'd usually say man, female.
Nobody thought it was hateful to do so.
And now the ruling is saying, you know, if you believe that identity is attached to biological sex, you're denying trans people.
Do you think that's a bit extreme?
You don't think that if you've gone, actually, you know what?
I already know how you feel.
So it's not the point.
I'm asking how you how I feel is that it's a fair judgment because the actual fine is only a portion of that $750.
The rest is legal fees.
He cost the court in time and money and dragged it out.
It didn't need to cost this much to anybody.
He could have come out of this a lot less under in debt than he will be.
Well, do you believe we should have the right to go through courts and things like that?
Or to have, yes, I do believe in the court process, but I also believe in showing up when you're supposed to and not dragging things out.
And I think you hold when you are a elected official, you have a responsibility to your constituents, and he broke that.
And that's, as an average citizen, say what you want.
When you're an elected official, you're serving somebody else.
She was basically saying you deserve to pay every cent of that penalty because you've dragged things through the process.
What do you make of that?
I certainly didn't drag things through it.
They were slow.
They'd have one hearing and then we'd have to wait a year and a half for them to get back to it.
Frankly, since this diversity, inclusion, and equity thing has happened in all the human resources offices, the Human Rights Tribunal is absolutely swamped with the most crazy and bizarre complaints.
I'm sure you're familiar with Jessica Yanov and Jessica Simpson and the crazy complaints that they accepted.
So they're swamped with all this nonsense.
And I'm just going to stop you there.
Two of those complaints are actually against Rebel News.
Jessica Serenity Simpson, also known formally as Jonathan Yaneve, had already had the attempt to say that what we reported on this individual, a very violent individual, a criminal, convicted many times, but slap on the wrist, assaulted our reporters, threatened my family.
We've brought this type of news to you.
And in a real court, the court said, no, there's nothing defamatory here.
They're practicing journalism, and this is a matter of public interest.
So now this individual is getting to go through this court that's giving you this huge penalty with two cases against us for our journalism.
And what's so crazy about that is section 7 of BC's Human Rights Code, for which Simpson is coming at us for, doesn't say whether or not we're getting the facts right.
It's not about that.
It's about whether or not anything we report on an individual who's been, for example, sexually inappropriate and text messaged with minors.
If we report on something that could cause people to be hateful or have contempt, that is actually what they are assessing.
It's very concerning.
What do you think is the main issue over and above the massive penalty, but the fact that you could get hit so hard from simply having a belief that was very mainstream, potentially still mainstream?
What's the big message that that sends?
You know, I think they're aware there's no way I can, in my lifetime, ever come up with three quarters of a million dollars.
But it sets a precedent.
And there are a lot of people that believe the same as me, that own a house, have a good job.
And since the precedent has already been set, you get nailed with three quarters of a million dollars.
That will scare a lot of people into shutting up and not speaking out against this gender ideology.
I feel like I've sort of been called to do this.
I could have shortened the process by settling out of court, but what I would have to do would be to lie, to say that I was wrong.
Initially, the complaint was a little different, you know.
Initially, the complaint was that I was creating a toxic work environment for their workers.
Well, anybody who knows anything about how school districts work, trustees don't go into classrooms and tell teachers what to do and criticize them for their gender behavior or whatever.
We sit in an office and we formulate policy.
And once the policy is done, we hand it to the superintendent and he makes sure that it happens in the classroom.
So we have no direct contact with teachers.
And so there's no way I could have contributed to a toxic environment in the classroom.
And then about three years in, they decided to amend their complaint that I was guilty of hate speech.
And of course, the hate speech, the only way they can define that is by me saying there's only male and female.
So they've done a very good job of scaring a lot of people into silence.
But on the other hand, they've stirred up a lot of people to agree with me.
I have never heard so many people publicly say that they agree with me and publicly make statements on social media, in meetings, with opinions that agree with me.
So I feel like I was put here for this reason.
It's important that I appeal the decision and make every effort to overturn it because there are going to be a lot of people after coming after me that will be affected by this decision.
It's not just, I'm not doing it just for Barry Neufeld.
I'm doing it for children.
One of the reasons they feel so strongly about this is that many adult people who have transitioned, they think that I was always intended to be a girl, but I was born with male sex parts.
And what they need to do is find children that will say earlier and earlier, I was born in the wrong body.
And that's why they keep pushing this gender ideology on younger and younger children.
It's to make themselves feel better about themselves that, you know, it wasn't the trauma or all the other things that happened to me in my life.
I was born this way.
And so I need to find some little kids that also think that they were born this way.
I do not believe that anybody is born in the wrong body.
I believe in a creator and I believe that God doesn't make mistakes.
And if you're born with boys' parts, you're always going to be a boy.
If you're born with girls' parts, you're always going to be a girl.
Do you have any fear saying that?
And would you have done anything differently now after receiving this penalty?
I've made a few mistakes along the way, but they're minor and they're off the topic.
No.
When I first heard about this in the summer of 2017, I knew I could not abide it.
I knew I had to speak out and I knew I could never back down.
I was offered a settlement and I was covered by indemnity insurance.
It wouldn't have cost me anything.
All I would have had to do was say publicly an apology and say that I was wrong.
And I could not do that.
I just couldn't feel that, couldn't live with myself if I told a public lie like that.
I talked to my lawyer, James Kitchen, this morning.
It's the first time we had a chance to talk since the decision came down.
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And we're both very determined that we're going to apply for a judicial review that's kind of like an appeal.
And it may take as long as three days.
James will argue on my behalf, but also there's some freedom organizations that may step in and help us.
One of them is the Free Speech Union represented by Lisa Bildy and also the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.
I've worked with them in the past, near the beginning of my troubles, and the Democracy Fund.
And we're hoping we can interest some other Organizations that stand up for traditional family values.
Now you're not giving up on the fight.
You said it's very important that you try and appeal this, and you just had a talk with your lawyers.
You said this is your first statement that you're going to make.
Tell us what's happening.
What's next with the fight?
Well, you were there the day that I turned myself into court on another matter.
And that stirred up so much interest that donations started to come in.
And my lawyer is completely paid off for everything he's done so far.
And we have a few thousand dollars extra for this appeal.
I've been very humbled by Billboard Chris.
He's been tweeting out how to support me.
There's a link on my webpage, which is Barry Neufeld, all one word, B-A-R-R-Y-N-E-U-F-E-L-D.com.
And on there, you'll find a link to the Rights and Freedoms Fundraising Society.
And you can e-transfer money, you can pay by credit card, you can mail a check, the address is there.
Or I don't really want the money passing through my hands because I'm not doing this for the money.
I'm doing this to try and protect future generations from this toxic ideology.
You heard how you could support Mr. Neufeld.
And also, if you have it in you and you want to protect our journalism in the same area with the same tribunal, please go to stopynive.com.