Norma LePage was the Regional Director for the Cowichan, Nanaimo, Port Alberni and Parksville/Qualicum SPCAs. These, with the exception of the Port Alberni SPCA, are the best SPCAs in the province.

We except the Port Alberni SPCA because we know too much about it. Chronically infested with fatal diseases is just one of the things that was permitted for decades. Ignoring rampant puppymill cruelty for years by the Manager was tolerated for decades too.

Then, when given the go-ahead by Craig Daniell, then Manager of Cruelty Investigations, now BC SPCA CEO, to start seizures, the Manager of the Port Alberni SPCA seized healthy dogs and pups from modest in-home breeders, Ron and Heather Graham, and proceeded to kill some with the diseases in its facility.

It also terrorized the dogs by keeping them in cells, and eventually sold what survived.

Then the SPCA destroyed the Grahams. It showed photos of severely neglected dogs of the same breed next to its website items about the Grahams and it permitted TV to show, over and over, these other dogs while airing news about the Grahams.

The Manager of the Port Alberni SPCA denies that she told the local paper to be at the Grahams for the seizure, yet the reporter got to the Graham's before the SPCA did.

Typically of the people the SPCA targets, the Grahams could not afford legal counsel (we have never heard of the SPCA investigating the wealthy and well-connected horse racing industry in BC), and so the SPCA's fat-cat lawyers made mincemeat of the Grahams at their farce of a trial for "cruelty". The SPCA made sure that the Grahams were painted as monsters in the media, stripped of the little money they had, and then convicted of cruelty, their only assest, their home and property with a lien against it, and took away the only joy that Heather Graham had, her dogs and her life winning ribbons with her dogs - over 500 of them. Sick, neglected dogs do not win ribbons.

The PCA Act permits the SPCA to leave animals in their familiar surroundings and demand improvements be made. The SPCA knew that the Grahams had reduced the numbers of dogs they had by half in the last two years, and were in the process of further reductions. Ron and Heather, unlike the SPCA, would not kill their dogs just for being old and so most of the dogs were not breeders or for show. But they were all inside the home, sleeping on the bed with the Grahams in turn. The SPCA said that the Grahams kept the dogs in dirty crates too much. Many witnesses said that Heather cleaned the crates and the dogs every morning. The SPCA removed these healthy, happy animals and inflicted great stress and terror on them, even death at its dirty facility... and it didn't have to! The question, "What was the SPCA's motive for inflicting such cruelty on the Grahams and their dogs, when it didn't have to?" needs investigating.

Graham pups....