Animal cruelty revisions dropped.

[britishbandit]

Animal cruelty revisions dropped

Joel Kom, CanWest News Service

Published: Wednesday, August 30, 2006

OTTAWA - The Conservative government has decided against re-introducing a Liberal bill from the last Parliament that would have modernized 19th-century definitions of animal cruelty.

The decision has angered animal-rights groups who lobbied for seven years to pass the bill.

The government will instead support a Liberal senator's bill, known as S-213, that focuses on increasing fines and jail terms for animal cruelty offences, a spokesman for Justice Minister Vic Toews said Tuesday.

The Conservatives won't re-introduce the last Parliament's legislation -- which was the fourth version of an animal-cruelty bill dating back to 1999 -- because it wasn't part of the party's platform, Mike Storeshaw said.

"S-213 is an approach we'd support," he said. "We think the (penalties) that exist are too low and S-213 is a good way of handling it."

The Senate bill, introduced in April by Liberal Senator John Bryden, would raise the maximum jail term to five years for indictable offences, higher than the current two-year maximum. The bill would also raise the maximum fine from the current $2,000 to $10,000 and allow judges to impose a lifetime ban on animal ownership for anyone convicted of animal cruelty.

Those penalties were all included in the last Parliament's legislation, which died last year after the election was called.

But the big difference, animal-rights groups said, was the parliamentary bill modernized definitions of animal cruelty that hadn't been updated much since the first such law was passed in 1892.

For example, crimes against animals are considered property offences.

Shelagh MacDonald, program director for the Ottawa-based Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, said she was "enormously disappointed" with the Conservative plan.

MacDonald said the Senate bill fails to lower the high threshold that demands prosecutors prove someone intended to neglect animals, something the parliamentary bill would have done.

The Senate bill would also not extend the law's protection to wild or unowned animals.