Unfortunate move by the Doug Ford government. This is how Conservatives lose governments.
Ontario Farmer – Tue Feb 5 2019
Byline: Ian Cumming
Ontario will appeal court’s OSPCA act decision; It leaves a bad taste with those who fought the five-year battle
The Ontario government is appealing a recent court ruling that the OSPCA Act violates the Charter and needs to be rewritten.
A January 25 email sent by lawyer Kurtis Andrews stated, “I have received informal notice that the AG (Attorney General) will appeal the OSPCA Act decision. Counsel for the AG confirmed it with me by email.”
On the same morning, Tom Black, former long-time president of the Ontario Landowners, who had fundraised six-figure money to fight this five-year court challenge, was bitter.
“We have no more money to keep on fighting this,” said Black. “Government and the agriculture organizations know that, and are, apparently, happy this morning.”
Black felt betrayed by those politicians pretending to be in favour of overturning the Act when in opposition, but now being part of a government, which wants to appeal, in court, any attempt to change the OSPCA Act for the better.
Conservative MPPs like Toby Barrett, Jim McDonell, Steve Clark and John Yakubuski – with the latter two now in cabinet – had been to some of the Animal Care Review Board and court hearings, recalled Black.
Earlier in January a Conservative MPP, who wished to remain unidentified, notified Ontario Farmer that, “Ernie (Hardeman) and OMAFRA want nothing to do with this,” (handling livestock humane cases in the future) Budgets were being frozen across the board, and OMA-FRA, centered in Guelph, had lobbied Hardeman hard in early January they didn’t want their salaries and positions diminished by on-farm staff being hired out in the countryside to do inspections, said the MPP.
Black believed there was enough of a groundswell for support for OSPCA reform among the Conservative rural caucus that their arguments and force would have carried the day.
“This court ruling was a gift handed them, if they were even remotely serious about reform,” he said.
The harsh things that happened to people in rural Ontario under the OSPCA since 2008 would not have been on the Ontario Attorney General’s radar, “who came from a different world than the rest of us,” quipped Black.
Would the AG, “have heard from farming and livestock groups in January?” asked Black. “You know she heard from the animal rights groups.”
There was a January 24 TV program in Toronto that had four representatives to speak about this Act being defeated, and agriculture sent no one to deliver their perspective, said Black. On that program, the night before Andrew’s email, Toronto lawyer Brian Schiller from Clayton Ruby’s office stated that the government was going to appeal.
“I was just sick,” said Black. Farmers will know soon enough whether Ontario agriculture organizations had just sat on their hands in January, and now regret not lobbying the government, said Black.
Or else these agriculture organizations were a main part of the effort to tell the government to appeal this ruling, since their financial ties, such as being paid to train OSPCA inspectors, was more important, said Black.
“If agriculture groups put up the big money to fight this appeal against the government, because the Landowners aren’t, we can’t anymore, that will say a lot,” said Black.
“But if they don’t put up the money, then we know for certain they are Judas, like we have suspected all along. Just like those rural MPP’s.”
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