Toronto Catholic trustee who fought gender ideology loses lengthy legal battle

A Catholic District School Board Trustee is stuck with a $200,000 legal bill after the Supreme Court of Canada denied his appeal to overturn a misconduct charge for “defending the Catholic faith."

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Author: Clayton DeMaine

A Toronto Catholic District School Board Trustee is stuck with a $200,000 bill in legal fees after the Supreme Court of Canada denied his appeal to overturn a misconduct charge against him for “defending the Catholic faith.”

The Supreme Court of Canada has refused Mike Del Grande’s appeal of a Superior Court decision, which found the TCDSB had legally reprimanded Del Grande for a motion he put forward in November 2019, in defence of Catholic teaching, within the Catholic school board.

The TCDSB reprimanded Del Grande after he sarcastically put forward a motion highlighting what he believed was a “slippery slope” decision by the board to include gender expression and gender identity as a protected group in the school board’s policy.

In the motion, Del Grande proposed that the school board also add terms such as “pedophilia,” “gerentophilia,” “beastiality” and “sexual vampirism” along with gender identity and expression to the list of protections, which began the five-year crusade against him.

Del Grande was also reprimanded for allegedly “verbally abusing” a 16-year-old pro-choice student trustee after speaking with her about reconciling herself to the Catholic teachings as a Catholic education leader. However, several witnesses attested that he hadn’t raised his voice or exhibited bad behaviour.

Del Grande served as the TCDSB trustee for Ward 7, Scarborough Agincourt since 2014 after serving as a Toronto City Hall councillor from 2003 to 2014. He spent much of his time, for five years, fighting sanctions from the school board.

Jack Fonseca, the director of political operations at Campaign Life Coalition, believes Del Grande would never have been sanctioned for confronting the student trustee had he not taken a stand against the addition of gender ideology to the school board’s policy.

CLC funded much of Del Grande’s legal fees and is currently helping crowdfund so the Catholic trustee can pay his $200,000 bill for his fight against the school board.

Fonseca told True North that Del Grande knew that if gender identity and expression were allowed to be added to the school policy, it could lead to students and staff dressing as the opposite sex, and males being allowed into female restrooms, changerooms and sports.

“If he hadn’t done that, I don’t think they would’ve bothered going after him on the abortion exchange with the student trustee,” he said. “That latter was just a convenient excuse to pile on and ensure Del Grande was destroyed. LGBT ideology was the sacred cow they were trying to protect.”

With his sarcastic motion, Fonseca said Del Grande attempted to shame the progressive trustees into backing out of a move which would have instituted un-Catholic positions into the school board’s bylaws.

He said Del Grande fought the case as much as he could, as he didn’t want a precedent to be made of prosecuting trustees for fulfilling their fiduciary obligations and defending the Catholic faith.

“He fought it in court, and…it failed at the lowest court. The Trudeau-appointed judge who wrote the decision agreed with the school board, and so he appealed it, and the initial appeal panel found that his arguments had merit,” Fonseca said. “They granted the appeal and awarded him $5,000 that the Toronto Catholic School Board had to pay to him.”

Another judge appointed by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the Superior Court of Ontario, however, sided with the school board and upheld its decision to sanction Del Grande for “teacher misconduct.”

This is when Del Grande appealed to the Supreme Court, which denied his appeal without stating whether the arguments against him had merit.

“It’s understandable that the Supreme Court can’t hear every appeal. 90% of them are dismissed,” Fonseca said. “We’ll never know if they would have agreed with his legal arguments, because they didn’t allow it to be heard.”

He said the whole ordeal has been especially taxing on Del Grande, not just financially as he paid much of his own legal fees, but on his health. Fonseca said the stress put on Del Grande by the trustee’s vendetta against him “put him into a cardiac incident.”

Fonseca said his defence of the Catholic faith and against the secular and liberal “Catholic” trustees has inspired other Christians to stand up for their values.

“He’s been able to inspire other Christians to fight for the truth and against what is wrong and evil, and to defend the right of elected officials to speak their conscience and to express their faith,” he said. “There have been a lot of parents over the last five years who have told Mike and us that they were inspired by his example to keep fighting, to not lay down and say ‘well this is the way of the world.’ if Mike can fight. We can too.”

Although Del Grande now faces misconduct sanctions, he can still run to represent his ward as a trustee if he chooses.

Fonseca says that with a new cardinal at the helm of the Archdiocese of Toronto, he hopes the next trustee who stands up for Catholic values will have the support of the diocese and its bishops.