A former Mission, B.C. school principal caught in a Creep Catchers sting has been banned from teaching for 15 years.
According to a decision published online Tuesday, a Teacher Regulation Branch panel found Jason Alan Obert guilty of conduct unbecoming of a teacher in July after he admitted to exchanging text messages in 2016 with two people who claimed to be teenagers.
Obert admitted to text exchanges that included “sexualized comments” with an apparent 15-year-old and to requesting and receiving photos from someone claiming to be 14, the decision said.
He also admitted he arranged to meet these apparent teenagers on two separate occasions.
The teenagers were, in fact, a member of Creep Catchers, a loose collection of organizations that claim to expose people they allege are child sexual predators by posing online as minors before meeting in person to film and berate their targets.
The Fraser Valley Creep Catchers group then recorded Obert at a food court in October 2016, where he’d arrived to meet with what he thought would be a teen.
Obert told a hearing that his online activity had been research for a piece on Creep Catchers he planned to write in his off-hours — a claim the panel found “not plausible.”
He was charged in November 2016, but Crown counsel later stayed charges of child luring, saying it had concerns about the admissibility of evidence, how it was obtained and the nature of the communications.
According to the panel decision, Obert’s certificate was suspended in October 2016 and the district terminated his employment the following month. His certificate was later cancelled due to non-payment of fees.
The Commissioner for Teacher Regulation sought a 25-year ban on the reissuance of a certificate, calling Obert’s conduct “an affront to the status and reputation of teachers.”
— With files from Simon Little, Emily Lazatin and The Canadian Press
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