Lawsuit: time line/Background

BC SPCA sues AAS for defamation in BC Supreme Court
Meet the Defendants

BC SPCA sues AAS for defamation in BC Supreme Court. The action (L042174) was commenced August 30th, 2004 in BC Supreme Court.

Please be assured that no donations to AAS are being used to pay our legal bills. President Judy Stone is using the equity in her home to defend the lawsuit.

All donations to AAS are used to fund our welfare, rescue, and advocacy mandates.

Our legal team is Dale Sanderson Q.C. and Tina Mihoc of Davis LLP.

An unknown amount of SPCA funds have been spent trying to silence the small volunteer, not-for-profit group and its AAS website.

TIME LINE
January 2001: First legal threat to sue Judy Stone.

October 2002: Second legal threat to sue server Net Nation.

August 2004: The SPCA starts a legal action for defamation in BC Supreme Court. Sixty-one page Statement of Claim served to ten defendants.

October 2005: SPCA-demanded mediation abandoned over wording of SPCA’s pre-mediation agreement.

December 2005: Amended Statement of Claim filed by SPCA. Defendants Hughes and Nagle dropped.

Spring 2006: Notices to Admit served by the SPCA on some of the defendants.

February 2007: BC SPCA Application for an Order of Confidentiality. The order would have prevented AAS and the other defendants from making any use of documents included in the BC SPCA's List of Documents for any purpose outside the litigation, unless they could establish the document was "otherwise lawfully available in the public domain".

AAS opposed the application. The Order the BC SPCA was seeking would have covered several hundred documents that the AAS already possesses. AAS argued that this action would unfairly limit its freedom of expression as an animal welfare advocacy group, to have to prove those documents were "lawfully available in the public domain", before it could use them in ways related to its work but unrelated to the lawsuit.

In its affidavit sworn in response to the BC SPCA's application, AAS referred to seven other specific instances where the BC SPCA had either threatened or brought defamation actions against other persons or groups that had made negative statements about the organization. It has always been AAS's position that the BC SPCA's lawsuit against it and the other defendants is a "SLAPP" suit, meant to discourage AAS and others from making statements about the SPCA that it considers critical.

February 2007: The BC SPCA abandoned its application for the extraordinary confidentiality order it was seeking.

June 2007: SPCA amended its Statement of Claim again.  It discontinued and abandoned the part of its claim relating to comments on the AAS website which dealt with issues of incompetence by the SPCA; a large, easily defendable section that cost money for Stone to defend. and it dropped two of the defendants from the action.

April to July 2007: The Defendants attended weeks of examinations for discovery where they were questioned by the SPCA lawyers. The SPCA representative, Mr. Craig Daniell, was examined by our lawyer for 6 days during July and August of 2007

September 2007: Trial adjourned.

October 24 2008: AAS's ninety-eight page Amended Statement of Defence with many particulars completed. Applied to the Court for permission to amend the Statement of Defence. The SPCA has said it will go before our judge to object to a significant amount of the amended defence. That hearing date is still to be determined. A new trial date will be set at that time.

Proposed Amended Statement of Defence

The AAS and Ms. Stone learned in or about July 2007, that the Statement of Defence that had been prepared and filed on their behalf at the beginning of the lawsuit did not contain all of the particulars that will be relied upon to establish their defences, particularly those of fair comment and justification, and so an amended defence was written and the court applied to, to accept it. 

The BC SPCA originally sued on fifty-two articles that were written by AAS or others and posted on the AAS website.  (It also claimed that the fifty-two posts were only examples, and that there were many other articles that were defamatory that it would use against us - without naming the other words!) The fifty-two articles were divided into four categories called schedules: Imputations of Cruelty; Imputations of Corruption; Imputations of Incompetence; and Imputations of Criminal Wrongdoing. (The large schedule, Imputations of Corruption, was dropped by the SPCA in 2007 without explanation after costing Judy Stone thousands of dollars to defend.)

The SPCA's huge statement of claim did not particularize which words in the articles it named allegedly imputed. As a result, it took a great deal of time to detail more fully the facts that they rely upon for each statement sued upon.  The facts that are contained in the 98 page proposed amended Statement of Defence are supported by hundreds of documents and the interviews of approximately 60 witnesses.  The AAS/Judy Stone proposed Amended Statement Defence is extremely detailed in describing the facts they rely upon to support their comments and statements.

The proposed Amended Statement of Defence pleads facts that are no doubt troubling to the BC SPCA, and it has, not surprisingly, objected to their proposed Amended Statement of Defence.

Ms Stone and AAS are seeking the Court’s approval of the proposed amend-ments.  They filed their Notice of Motion along with a copy of the proposed Amended Statement of Defence, containing 98 pages of the particular facts they rely upon for the defences of fair comment, justification, and qualified privilege, with the Registry on October 24, 2008.  

 

February 5 2009: All parties to the action forced to attend court-ordered mediation by the SPCA which Judy Stone had to pay thousands of dollars for. Mediation failed.

 

February 18 2009: Our trial judge, Madam Justice Fenlon, heard our application to amend the defences of AAS/Judy Stone and several of the other defendants.  The SPCA attempted to have almost all of our evidence, of what we allege are systematic wrongdoings by the SPCA, disallowed so that the evidence cannot be revealed to the public at a trial.

 

September/November 2009: At AAS's request, a trial has been set down for approximately six weeks where we may call as many as 60 witnesses. The SPCA's lawyers asked for the trial to be set for the Fall of 2010.

 

Animal Advocates Society (AAS) is a BC-based organization that acts on behalf of abandoned and suffering animals. AAS works around the principles of research, rescue, rehabilitate, rehome, and reform.

“In order to defend this lawsuit, which could cost up to $700,000, I’ve had to use my home’s equity. Whose money is the SPCA using?” asked Judy Stone, founder of the Animal Advocates Society. “Wouldn’t that money be better used on spaying and neutering all the animals it sells, and treating disease, instead of killing sick animals?

“We are not the first organization to be threatened or sued by the SPCA,” said Stone. “The SPCA won’t disclose how much it has spent to silence people by paying them or threatening them.

“Surely something is very wrong when BC SPCA Directors quit and post their reasons on the AAS WatchDog board, saying that the only place to know what is really going on with cruelty prevention in BC is to read AAS,” said BC SPCA past-president Rick Sargent.

THE GOAL
By publishing materials concerning the BC SPCA, whether critical of it or not, on the AAS website and in WatchDog posts, emails, newsletters, and letters to the SPCA and others, it has always been the goal of AAS, to bring about lasting positive change to the BC SPCA and its policies, practices, and procedures, as the largest and most powerful animal welfare organization in the province. This has been stated on the AAS website for seven years. AAS has repeatedly written that it does not want to do the SPCA any financial harm; that in fact we want the SPCA to be financially strong so that it may practice real animal welfare and do real cruelty prevention according to the standards we believe animal-lovers expect and the many small alternative societies practice. For several years after the SPCA announced in 2001 that it would reform its animal-disposing policies and practices, AAS defended some very questionable actions that the SPCA continued, for the oft-stated reason that we were trying to be fair to the SPCA and give it the time necessary to radically change an entrenched animal-disposal business. Over the last four years, we also organized letter-writing campaigns that resulted in the SPCA finally changing a number of important animal-welfare policies that many people found shockingly unethical. Although the SPCA held a Community Consultation process in 2001, and in its report pointed out that the contracting business of animal control/disposal (the dog-catcher) was causing the most public dissatisfaction and loss of support for the SPCA, the animal control/disposal contracting business is still being aggressively pursued by the SPCA.
 

SLAPP SUITS

AAS has alleged that this litigation against it is designed to suppress criticism of the BC SPCA and its operations by AAS and others. In other words, AAS believes that this lawsuit is a "SLAPP" suit.

"Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation", or SLAPP, is a phrase coined by US researchers to describe a class of lawsuit that seems designed more to silence public criticism than to receive legitimate compensation. The researchers state: "In contrast to most litigation, the SLAPP suit is brought, not to resolve a problem, but to remove a controversy from the political arena..." As the target of one SLAPP suit stated: "The law of defamation is supposed to protect people's reputations from unfair attack. In practice its main effect is to hinder free speech and protect powerful people from scrutiny. Defamation actions and threats to sue for defamation are often used to try to silence those who criticize people with money and power."

COSTS

AAS considers that (at the time of the commencement of this action), that instead of funding improved animal welfare, the BC SPCA was funding lawsuits and threats of lawsuits against the advocates of reform. How many more attempts have been made by the SPCA to use or threaten to use the courts to suppress complainants' information? How many lawyers have been hired to negotiate out-of-court settlements with complainants and ex-employees? BC SPCA members and donors deserve answers to those questions. BC SPCA members and donors also deserve to know how many hundreds of thousands the SPCA has paid in legal bills for the litigation against AAS. SPCA members have asked and received no answer at all.

The defendants abhor this litigation as they consider that every dollar spent by the BC SPCA and by themselves on this litigation, is a dollar that will not be used to assist animals in need. However, they believe that they must nonetheless continue to defend their right to express their opinions on animal-welfare and to speak out against what they perceive to be animal-welfare errors made by the BC SPCA.

Judy Stone, using the equity in her home, is paying for the defence of the lawsuit. In order to meet the onerous costs imposed by this lawsuit, Judy Stone will have to sell her house to continue to defend the action against herself and AAS.