PENTICTON — Five independent candidates will introduce themselves to Chilliwack at noon Wednesday as Trustees for Change, an informal slate seeking to return School District 33 to a focus on academic basics.The group is seeking to reshape a board controlled by a Canadian Labour Congress-aligned majority since the Barry Neufeld wars of 2018. This is the same District 33 table that spent a decade as a provincial proxy fight after Neufeld, a trustee from 1992 to 2008 and again from 2011 to 2022, denounced the government’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, SOGI 123, classroom resource and curriculum..“We are presenting a diverse and highly qualified group of candidates who are going to be campaigning on positive ideas to improve our schools and refocus our district’s priorities on the fundamentals: graduating students with solid numeracy, literacy and critical thinking skills,” Tera Procee, a longtime Chilliwack business operator and the campaign’s listed contact, said in a statement sent to Western Standard on Monday.The five names on the slate’s website are Barbara Bednarski, Michael Carter, Marina Garmon, Hugh Hamilton and Cary Moore. Trustees for Change says it is not a political party or registered elector organization. The candidates are independently funded and are coordinating some shared advertising and communications costs..Procee operates Hofstede’s Country Barn with her husband, sitting trustee Richard Procee, who was elected in 2022 on a ParentsVoice BC ticket and has been the lone conservative-leaning voice still at the table since former MLA Laurie Throness resigned in February. She is the campaign spokesperson, not one of the five candidates.The group’s backgrounder is blunt about why a slate exists. In 2018 and 2022, it says, the Canadian Labour Congress, through its affiliate the Fraser Valley Labour Council, poured outside resources into Chilliwack school board races to remove trustees who “believed strongly in child safeguarding and opposed conducting radical social experiments through the school system.” Public-sector unions including CUPE and the BC Teachers’ Federation, the document argues, sat in “a clear conflict of interest in manipulating school board elections.”That history is neither invented nor imaginary, and the conflict is well documented. The Fraser Valley Labour Council, a Canadian Labour Congress chartered body, publicly endorsed four District 33 candidates in 2018, including David Swankey and Willow Reichelt, both still on the board. In 2022 the Chilliwack Teachers’ Association, the labour council, BCGEU and the CLC were listed among the backers of the progressive ticket that elected Swankey, Reichelt, Carin Bondar, Margaret Reid and Teri Westerby, producing a 5-2 majority over Heather Maahs and Richard Procee.Trustees for Change say their previous attempts to beat that majority failed because opponents never matched the unions’ "close, disciplined phalanx."If elected, the five say they will not operate as a caucus or impose preordained policies. They pledge to restore the collaborative model they say existed before 2018 and to work with whoever is left of the current majority..What they will not keep is the board’s “stakeholder consultation” practice.Parents and other individual citizens, the backgrounder says, have lost the ability to address the board in public meetings and been replaced by “permanent representatives of powerful groups” with an inside track and monthly consultations. The slate wants public input returned to public meetings “in which all citizens are equal individuals, not cartels represented by powerful NGOs.”They also pledge to end what they call lawfare against trustees who hold minority opinions. “Differences of opinion on public policy are not reasons for motions of censure, financial penalties or suspension of trustee voting right,” the document states. They say they will enact policies to prohibit the legal harassment of board members by the board majority solely for diverging political views.The current board has six sitting members after Throness quit on February 26, hours after the BC Human Rights Tribunal ordered former trustee Barry Neufeld to pay $750,000 to the Chilliwack Teachers’ Association for posts and speeches about sexual orientation and gender identity resources between 2017 and 2022. Throness said the ruling placed a "chill on the speech of elected officials" and that he could no longer do the job. Chair David Swankey left the seventh seat vacant until October rather than call another byelection.Neufeld had already been censured, stripped of school liaison duties and barred from district events involving students. Maahs, who left the board after winning Chilliwack North for the Conservatives in 2024, was censured three times in one term. Neufeld later lost a defamation appeal over calling Bondar a “strip-tease artist.”.The slate’s platform is shorter than the grievance list. Public schools’ primary purpose, it says, is to teach children how to think, not what to think. Parents are “the senior, not junior partners” in their children’s education. Teachers, administrators and trustees are parent allies. Diversity of opinion belongs in the classroom and on the board. Inclusion of disabled students and others facing challenges “needs to be evidence-based and results-focused, not symbolic.”Three candidates who offered full bios to Western Standard lean on their history and work outside the current board culture.Bednarski is a retired elementary teacher who taught in the Franco-Ontarian north and in communities with large indigenous populations before managing a Fraser Valley dairy farm and finishing her working life as manager and bookkeeper at Goat’s Pride Dairy in Abbotsford. She has volunteered more than 20 years with addiction and recovery programs, including Sudbury’s Overcomers, and directed a shelter for homeless adolescent boys. She says a district facing enrolment decline and provincial belt-tightening needs someone who has actually kept books.Moore has lived in Chilliwack since 1985. He and his wife raised 64 foster children, adopted four, and sent more children through Strathcona Elementary than any other family in the district, the campaign says. Two of the adopted sons live with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. A 14-year-old daughter with a rare brain condition, autism, dwarfism and significant cognitive challenges attends Chilliwack Secondary and communicates through basic sign and gesture. Moore co-owned a water-delivery firm, later expanded into water-purification plants, spent 20 years as WestJet cabin crew and now works in real estate. He sits on the Strathcona PAC and has served as indigenous representative for the Chilliwack District Parent Advisory Council, coming from a Red River Métis family. He describes himself as a practising Christian who rejects “trendy modern identity politics” and says the indigenous community, like every other, holds diverse beliefs, “none of which should be privileged above others.”.Hamilton is a third-generation British Columbian who taught English as a second language in Taiwan for seven years, then rose to senior manager of ticketing and service with the Vancouver Whitecaps before moving into business coaching. He has taken short-term general-manager contracts with Chilliwack FC and Controlled Bolting and, since 2025, has worked as regional sales manager for Pacbrake. He moved to Chilliwack in 2022. His household is trilingual — Mandarin, Spanish and English — and his daughter is in the local public system. He volunteers on field trips, sports and homework.Carter and Garmon are also named on the slate site.The field itself is already larger than five. Inclusive-education advocate Katie Bartel, a former Chilliwack DPAC chair and current BCCPAC secretary, announced in May she is running again after losing the March 2025 byelection to Throness, 3,977 to 3,163. Longtime Chilliwack teacher Dr. Leah Kelley, who holds an education doctorate from Simon Fraser University, declared in June. Several 2022 also-rans and former trustees have been discussed in local coverage as possible re-entries. Incumbents have not all said whether they will stand.District 33 elects seven trustees at large. The pre-campaign period began July 20. Campaign spending limits apply once nominations close September 11. Advance polls are October 7 and October 14.Procee said she is confident the team will help the district “regain its focus and use its resources more efficiently.” Whether Chilliwack voters want that focus, or prefer the board they have elected twice, is the question the October 17 ballot is built to answer.
