Certainly, and thank you for your question, because it gives me the opportunity to clarify that.
I'm in the court quite a bit. In almost 31 years of being employed by the Ontario SPCA and about four years by the BCSPCA, I've laid many Criminal Code charges and provincial offence charges. I think the confusion comes from a quotation, or perhaps from somebody comparing statistics. I think the Ontario SPCA averages 15,000 to 16,000 cruelty investigations per annum. We lay charges in a range of 500 to 600 per year. I think that's where the 0.1% comes in. So it's not necessarily a conviction but a prosecution rate. They are charges that we feel, based on the existing legislation and the poor wording of the legislation, we'll be able to present to court or to take into the courts.
It's true that our charges were up by 43% in 2004, but there are two reasons for that. First of all, the Ontario SPCA received a penalty section in 2002 under the OSPCA Act. So the 43% increase in charges isn't just from Criminal Code charges; there are provincial offence charges in there as well. So we began laying charges under the puppy mill legislation in Ontario. These charges are lumped into the overall figure. So it's a bit misleading for someone to quote those statistics.
Yes, our conviction rate is very high, at 80% to 90%. I don't have the exact percentile, but it is very high for a number of reasons. The primary reason is that we don't take cases to court frivolously.