At the Vancouver city council meeting of September 20, 2001, at which the AAS report, "IT'S TIME!" was discussed, council listened to AAS's presentation, made by five AAS spokespersons.

City staffs' report recommended that the City depend on the SPCA to "take care of" the problem of cruelly isolated (and possibly dangerous) dogs in Vancouver.

We pointed out that the SPCA had not tried to enforce the Humane Standards of Care of dog bylaws that AAS had caused to be adopted in eleven other lower mainland municipalities, in fact telling people reporting terrible deprivation of a dog that either the bylaw did not exist or that it was unenforceable.

Nevertheless, council passed a unanimous resolution urging the SPCA to keep a log of all the complaints made to it by members of the public, and to enforce its mandate under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal Act.

We believe that council was sincere in its concern for these dogs, but was led to do the wrong thing by its legal and support staff.

SPCA spokesperson Cindy Soules, who also attended, said that strengthening the interpretation of the PCA Act was one of the SPCA's top priorities and that she hoped the City and the public would see some progress in that regard by early 2002.

In April 2002, seven months after saying that, and nine months after the meetings held between the City's legal and support staff and the BC SPCA, at which the SPCA admitted that it could (and would) use the PCA Act to help isolated yard dogs in Vancouver, the SPCA finally gave the City the Eccles Report on some of the dogs in AAS's Report which was so hollow, so devoid of usable information as to be unmistakeable proof that the SPCA was not, or would not, or could not, "take care of" this problem.

If the City was naive about the SPCA before the Eccles Report, it cannot claim to be so after getting the Eccles Report, and yet it still did nothing.

And did the City put any protocol in place to assure that the SPCA was keeping a log of these dogs and reporting the log to the City? We have been told very little, in fact we were initially excluded from the "insider" meetings held by the City and the BC SPCA, so we do not know, but don't believe it did. (Read how AAS forced the City and the SPCA to allow us to attend the subsequent meetings: http://www.animaladvocates.com/spca-city-secretmeetings.htm)