Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to appear.
I am a lawyer and the executive director of Animal Justice, Canada's leading national animal law advocacy organization. Together with our tens of thousands of supporters, we work to improve laws protecting animals. This is a big task because, frankly, Canada has fallen quite far behind. We have some of the worst animal protection laws in the western world, particularly on farms.
Let me just set the scene for you. We do not have federal or provincial laws regulating animal welfare on farms in this country. Many of the most cruel farm practices are still legal and common in Canada, despite being outlawed in places like the EU and in many U.S. states. This includes things like keeping pregnant pigs in gestation crates, which are metal cages so small that the mothers can't even turn around, and crowding egg-laying hens inside tiny wire cages where they can't even spread their wings, and farming animals for their fur.
Along with our lack of laws comes a lack of transparency and oversight. Farmed animals are typically kept behind closed doors in areas that, as you know, the public can't access. There are no government inspections of farms to proactively monitor animal welfare, including by the CFIA. Provincial agencies tend to respond only if a complaint is made, and no farmer or worker has a legal obligation to report anything they see.
One of the few times that a cruelty complaint can be made occurs when a person goes to work undercover on a farm and films what they see, wearing a hidden camera. I have been involved in many such exposés. For example, the last investigation that Animal Justice did was at a pig farm in Ontario. This aired on CTV's W5 program. It resulted in a conviction against the pig farm for a lethal C-section on a live, conscious pig in what industry would call a “slash and grab” to remove the piglets, and also in a conviction for castrating piglets and docking their tails without anaesthesia.
Unfortunately, the animal farming industry in Canada has been pushing agricultural gag laws—so-called “ag-gag” laws—that make it illegal to do this type of undercover work on farms and in order to shut down videos of animal cruelty. These laws first started sweeping the United States in the 2010s and are now also law, as we've heard, in Alberta and in Ontario. It's illegal in those provinces for journalists and whistle-blowers to go undercover on a farm. It turns that conduct into a trespass. We believe those two laws are unconstitutional, as they restrict free expression under the charter, which is why we are challenging Ontario's law in court. That case will be heard starting on October 30. U.S. ag-gag laws have also been challenged and struck down in six states now.
This bill targets anyone unlawfully on a farm, which in Ontario and Alberta includes undercover workers and journalists. The language prohibiting taking a “thing” into a farm seems targeted at a hidden camera that an undercover worker or journalist might wear and puts these whistle-blowers at significant risk of prosecution simply for bringing images to the world. The ban on undercover work makes this bill vulnerable to a constitutional challenge.
I'll note that in Canada, biosecurity protocols are currently entirely voluntary, and studies show that adherence to them on farms is poor. We've analyzed decades of data from the CFIA, and in a report that I will provide to this committee, we've seen that farmers are responsible for most biosecurity issues and that a sit-in has never caused a disease. It tends to be standard farm practices like sharing needles, having wild animals access farms and using contaminated equipment across different areas that spread disease.
This committee also received a letter from 19 infectious disease specialists. They note that undercover video is good for biosecurity and actually spurred on one of the largest food safety-based recalls in U.S. history. These experts conclude that this bill seeks to weaponize genuine concerns about infectious diseases and animal and human health in order to increase protection of private businesses from bad publicity.
I'll say as well that this bill doesn't address any legal gap. Provinces do have trespass laws already, but more to the point, there is also the Criminal Code. All of the sit-ins referenced last week resulted in criminal convictions, and these are the most serious charges possible, like break and enter, mischief and theft.
For example, we're going to hear from a Mr. Binnendyk on the next panel about the Excelsior Hog Farm sit-in, which occurred after videos emerged showing pretty troubling conditions on farms, including some pigs that couldn't walk and slowly died on a filthy concrete floor. Two people were convicted and sentenced to jail time after the sit-in, which is actually the harshest known sentence in Canadian history for a peaceful protest of this nature.
I'll just conclude by saying that I know committee members have been hearing from a lot of constituents who have concerns about this bill, and I urge you not to dismiss those concerns. It's time to pause and consider why it is that public trust in farming is so low. I would say that it's not because people are misinformed; it's because they see video after video of animals being beaten on farms, animals with severe medical conditions that don't get treatment, and animals being killed in brutal ways.
They see conditions the public simply no longer accepts, and they're frustrated by the lack of laws and the secrecy. The response to these legitimate public concerns should not be to pass laws that further undermine transparency.
Thank you.