OSPCA pulls out of Grey-Bruce

Saturday, February 23, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

The Grey County Federation of Agriculture’s board plans to discuss the permanent closure of the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals office in Hanover at its monthly meeting Thursday.

Grey Federation president Wayne Balon says they weren’t told ahead of time that the office was being closed and he found out about it from news reports.

“Between everyone, we’ll have to come to a compromise and a solution to represent the welfare of animals in Bruce and Grey counties,” he says. But “the OSPCA hasn’t really had a great reputation in the public eye this last little while.”

Bruce County Federation of Agriculture president John Gillespie says they too weren’t told ahead of time about the closure. “As a federation, we have a lot of concerns about some of what the OSPCA has been doing.”

OSPCA agent Brad Dewar, investigations and communications officer, says the office, a rented space, will close on March 1. Two agents have been working out of the location and covering Grey and Bruce Counties but the organization lacks a local shelter space for animals.

The area will no longer have staff specifically assigned to it, he adds.

Dewar says the officers currently working at the office have jobs until March 1 “and after that it goes to human resources.” The OSPCA has 100 agents and inspectors across Ontario.

A spokesman to Ontario Community Safety and Correctional Services Minister Madeleine Meilleur, says by email the OSPCA is an independent charity and the government doesn’t direct or interfere with its operations, including decisions about branch locations and investigator deployment. Ottawa-Vanier MPP Meilleur is responsible for the OSPCA.

“We understand that in support of this announcement the OSPCA sent letters to municipal officials in the impacted area,” the spokesman says, noting the agency has offered to meet with municipal representatives to discuss options for service delivery.

Dewar says the OSPCA is a non-profit charity that only receives a government education grant of about $500,000 a year for officer training but no government funding for the investigation work it does or for the officers’ equipment. The investigation work is all funded through donations. “Due to budget limitations, we had to make the difficult decision to pull our services from that area.”

Dewar says the OSPCA receives funding from all over Ontario and “there’s been a little bit of a reduction so the service had to be reduced at this point in time.” The Grey Bruce OSPCA office is the only one in Ontario being closed. Asked why that office was picked for closure, Dewar says “ultimately that’s a decision the management makes in looking at the number of investigations and officers for that area.”

Dewar says he isn’t aware of the OSPCA having to close an office or facility in any other area before now.

Semi-retired Bruce County cow-calf producer Carl Noble used to be on the board of the OSPCA but resigned around 2007 because of what he calls the agency’s heavy-handed approach. Noble says the office has to raise funds by donation to pay for part of the costs and in his opinion “if they can’t do it, then that’s why they’ve closed it.”

Before the OSPCA had the office in Hanover, it cost them $52,000 a year to operate in the Grey-Bruce area and “they were supposed to raise a minimum of half of it,” he says. Prior to that there was a humane society in the area that Noble and his wife served with as volunteer directors and that was run on $7,000 to $10,000 a year “because the agents were volunteers and the board members were volunteers.” The agents under the humane society were only paid for mileage and their meals were covered if they had to be out during meal times.

Dewar says pulling its services from the area means the OSPCA would no longer be responding to animal cruelty calls for the Grey-Bruce area and the calls would be directed to the local municipal or provincial police.

About the police enforcement of provincial and federal animal cruelty laws in the Grey-Bruce areas, Gillespie says “from an operations standpoint I don’t think we’d have a concern with the police. I think they’d be professional enough to do a proper job.”

Dewar says the OSPCA has also asked Grey-Bruce area municipalities if they’d be interested in a fee for service arrangement.  

Dewar says the OSPCA has “had a presence in Grey-Bruce since 2002.” He didn’t have the figures for how much it cost to operate the Hanover office annually. But the officers were involved in about 400 investigations annually in Grey and Bruce counties. In 2011, the OSPCA as a whole was involved in 16,000 investigations. The investigations were for all concerns and for all kinds of animals, including domestic and farm animals.

The 400 annual investigations for the Grey-Bruce area “is relatively consistent with many areas of the province,” Dewar says. BF