Great News for Farm Animals!

Thanks to Alexandra Mendès, Liberal Member of Parliament for Brossard - La Prairie, farm animals may soon get some long-overdue respect. On October 28, 2009, Ms Mendès tabled Bill C-468 to amend section 148 of the transportation of animals regulations. The bill was seconded by Frank Valeriote, Liberal Member of Parliament for Guelph, Ontario, and Alexander Atamanenko, NDP Member of Parliament for British Columbia Southern Interior (left, in photo). To date, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has not reduced the transport timelines. Along with the Canadian Coalition for Farm Animals, we continue to pressure the federal Minister of Agriculture, the Honourable Gerry Ritz, to amend the transport timelines to a maximum of 8 hours (visit the "Farm Animals" campaign section at http://www.animalalliance.ca/ for more information).

As well, we're still in the middle of an enforcement complaint we submitted in order to protect cormorants on Middle Island, Point Pelee National Park. There will hopefully be a resolution in favour of the cormorants in the months to come.

And we continue to work to end the commercial seal hunt. On a separate but related note, Liz, unexpectedly, had to head out to Halifax to try to stop the commercial grey seal hunting on Hay Island - what is supposed to be a provincially protected wilderness area! Approximately 1,400 seals have been killed for their pelts, bashed on the head with bats and skinned with box-cutters. We believe the government has not met the requirements of the Wilderness Areas Protection Act in order to allow this activity. In spite of submissions from a number of groups, Bill 50 is to receive Royal Assent this week.

So some good news and some not so good news.

On a positive note, our office foster, Alice has gone to a wonderful home - yay! And we now have four FIV kittens tearing the office apart -- it's a wonder how anything gets done here = )

Update...

Hi all, sorry for the long absence. We have been occupied by a number of our ongoing campaigns, including barn fires, cormorants, human / wildlife conflict, and of course, Project Jessie. And we had a major computer problem in July that took weeks to sort out. A stressfull time to say the least! So things were back up and running in August and after playing catch-up, we are finally back into our routine, which is anything BUT routine!

Our relatively new office foster, Alice, has been here for a month and is still adjusting to the life and noises of the office - although Bobby, our other foster is not making it easy for her! That's Picasso in the pic above - a special needs cat who we are trying to rehome. He used to be an outdoor cat who has learned to live indoors but is in desperate need of cat company. He's deaf and has a leg deformity but makes his way around just fine.

And with all this talk about polls and elections, we're preparing for the possibility of running candidates again, should our elected officials decide an election is necessary. We're hoping to run more candidates, so if you or anyone you know would be interested in representing AAEVPC, give us a call (416-462-9541).

That's it in a nutshell. I won't rant this time!