July 18, 2001
The Community Consultation Panel
BC SPCA

Why are you holding exclusive meetings when you have said repeatedly and publicly that this "process" will be open, transparent and accountable?

I would like to be invited to attend the follow-up meeting to the first secret meeting to discuss the SPCA's lack of enforcement of the PCA act.  If I am not, I can only assume that I am not welcome because I know too much; that there isn't a deceptive statement that can be made by the SPCA that I have not the evidence that can refute and correct it; that only I have all the evidence that the SPCA is self-serving and dishonest and has been for at least fifty years and so can point out when it is continuing to plan to serve itself; that only I have a full overview of the all the SPCA's perfidy and so can prevent future dishonesty. 

A person with this range and depth of comprehension should be welcomed.   And yet I am being excluded. 

AAS was then included in the two subsequent meetings. At these meetings the SPCA argued against AAS that the PCA didn't need to be improved, the SPCA just needed to "raise the bar"* on prosecutions.  AAS pointed out that for decades the SPCA used the so-called (by them) "inadequacy" of the Act to avoid prosecuting, and that by stopping AAS's improvements to the Act, in our view, proved that the SPCA did not want the Act to be more usable. We argued at these meetings that no one would know if the SPCA was "raising the bar".   Unfortunately, the five lawyers attending these meetings (only one from the SPCA so the others should be ashamed of themselves) agreed with the SPCA.  As usual, AAS was alone.  It was decided that a committee would be formed to "help" the SPCA raise the bar.  AAS asked to be on this committee.  We have heard nothing of it.  Another opportunity lost to make real, meaningful changes for the sake of the thousands of animals whose suffering will go on thanks to these lawyers allowing the SPCA to get away with this. Set-backs like this mean that the fight will take years longer.

*By "raising the bar" the lawyers and the SPCA meant that it would start to do what it should have done many years before such as: looking for a sympathetic prosecutor, educating that prosecutor, putting so many cases before the prosecutor that some make it to court and some get convictions. This is how law develops; it is called building case history.

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Read how the BC SPCA stopped AAS from making improvements to the PCA Act in 1998, http://www.animaladvocates.com/spca-stops-laws.htm , and how the SPCA decided it would lose a defamation suit against AAS because we had so much proof of our allegations, (http://www.animaladvocates.com/libelthreat.htm).

So - has the SPCA " raised the bar"?  Not that AAS knows of and we know of many instances of cruelty that could have been used as test cases.  Without test case prosecutions, prosecutors and judges cannot know what the SPCA wants of them.  If all the Crown gets is a couple of requests a year from the SPCA to prosecute, and those only the very worst, undeniable cases of cruelty such as the one in Victoria where a man bludgeoned and almost killed his dog and then buried it still alive (which case may have been prosecuted at the request of the police, not the SPCA as is often the case), then prosecutors will tend to refuse to take on a case and judges will tend to see that neglect is not cruelty.  That is the system that the SPCA created  by so seldom requesting the courts to prosecute.  Was this deliberate or just an oversight on the part of the BC SPCA? 

BC SPCA Director of Field Operations (runs the branches and policy), John van der Hoeven, the man who for twenty years decided which cases of cruelty would not be prosecuted, is still in charge.  It was Mr van der Hoeven who decided that there would be no prosecution of the man who dragged his dog behind his pick-up truck (to teach it a lesson) and admitted on television that he had done this.  The SPCA returned the dog to its "master".  For everyone who has ever been frustrated when they reported gross neglect or cruelty to the agency empowered to "prevent cruelty", it was John van der Hoeven who influenced the "hands-off" policy.  Mr van der Hoeven still has this job at the BC SPCA.  Is it any wonder AAS is sceptical of any real change?

In December of 2001, AAS ran expensive ads in the Vancouver Courier, Ming Pao Daily, and the Korea Times, urging people to bring their dogs in out of the cold, and explaining what a dog's social needs are (click here AAS ADVERTS).  As a result we received many more reports of seriously neglected dogs in Vancouver, all of which the SPCA knows of. Two of them are particularly unsettling enough to warrant "raising the bar". To the best of our knowledge, the SPCA has not used these opportunities to "raise the bar".