MEDICINE HAT — As parliamentarians continue to debate banning live shipments of horses for meat, an animal advocacy organization says it’s successfully launched a private prosecution concerning the trade.
The charges stem from a December 2022 shipment from Winnipeg to Japan, which was delayed due to bad weather during a layover in Anchorage, Alaska, resulting in horses exceeding the legal 28-hour limit for transportation.
A complaint to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency by Animal Justice, the Winnipeg Humane Society, the Canadian Horse Defence Coalition and Manitoba Animal Save failed to result in enforcement action.
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Kaitlin Mitchell, director of legal advocacy for Animal Justice, said her organization launched a private prosecution due to inaction by the CFIA, but noted the regulatory agency was informed about the incident at the time.
“It wasn’t until after it became clear to us the CFIA was not going to take any enforcement action that we decided to take this rather extraordinary step of commencing a private prosecution,” she said.
An information was filed in court in June by Animal Justice’s executive director, Camille Labchuk, outlining the allegations under the federal Health of Animals Regulations.
Some of those charges were stayed by both federal and provincial crown prosecutors, but the substantive allegation of the shipper failing to have a contingency plan to deal with transportation delays is moving forward.
She said Animal Justice believes the company had a legal obligation to have a contingency plan, “and it does not appear, on the evidence we’ve seen, that there was one.”
Mitchell said there needs to be an end to shipments of live horses for slaughter and that the federal government made a commitment to do so two years ago.
“In the meantime, about 4,000 horses have been shipped to Japan and the least we can do for those animals is to enforce the few legal protections that we have on the books for them,” said Mitchell.
Members of the House agriculture committee are currently debating the merits of a private member’s bill introduced by Liberal backbencher Tim Louis after it received second reading.
The move is supported by Liberal and NDP MPs while Conservative and Bloc Québécois MPs oppose it, saying the bill doesn’t consider improved transportation regulations. Opposition has also been focused on whether the bill would lead to other restrictions on transportation of different livestock, by air or otherwise.
