Please join us in celebrating a Life-time Achievement Award from Lush Cosmetics that has been awarded to our own, Liz White!
We, Liz White’s friends and colleagues, know that this honour is richly deserved, and we are grateful to Lush Cosmetics for their recognition of Liz’s decades of hard work and advocacy on behalf of animals.
A Transformational Leader:
Liz White is a transformational leader in the animal rights movement in Canada. She has worked tirelessly on behalf of all animals for more than four decades. It’s safe to say that without Liz, there would be no Animal Alliance of Canada (AAC) nor would there be an Animal Protection Party of Canada (APPC).
Liz was one of the original co-founders of AAC almost 40 years ago, and has never wavered in her dedication to saving the lives of animals. Liz, along with other co-founders, worked hard to build up an advocacy organization to address all of the ways that humans hurt and kill animals for pleasure and profit. Liz has been consistent in her commitment to our organization, dedicating much of her adult life to this work. Today, we celebrate Liz, and recognize the enormous personal sacrifices that she has made to build a strong organization that has saved the lives of countless animals in Canada.
Those of us who know her also know that she is wonderfully kind, to animals certainly, but to all of us as well. She is a gracious leader who has made the Animal Alliance of Canada Toronto office a warm and friendly environment.
Liz White will do whatever it takes to save animals. She delegates before elected representatives on behalf of animals. She monitors the killing of Double-crested Cormorants as they are shot from their nests by Parks Canada staff. She travels to other provinces to work with local advocates to stop the routine killing of deer, geese, beavers and other wild animals. She has been, and is, the Canadian leader in her efforts to end the exploitation of former companion animals in research.
A Visionary Idea – A Political Party for Animals is Born:
A cutting-edge thinker, Liz understood that a political party that includes animals within the sphere of concern could play an important role in the Canadian political landscape. A federally-registered political party can act in ways that an advocacy organization cannot to promote legislation and interact in the political realm. As a result, Animal Alliance of Canada, along with many of our supporters, established the Animal Protection Party of Canada (APPC) and Liz White is its leader.
As Liz says about the APPC, it is: “North America’s first federal political party dedicated solely to the protection of all animals and the environment.” There can be no true social justice without including other sentient beings in our national protections and provisions.
A Fellow Co-founder Describes Liz:
Before co-founding AAC, and later the APPC, Liz White was a registered nurse, a career choice that fits so well with her concern for others and her demonstrated desire to ease suffering and to preserve lives. Later, Liz worked as a communications specialist for the Toronto Humane Society, where she met Barry Kent MacKay, a wildlife expert who went on to also become one of our co-founders. Liz and Barry continue to work together to protect wild animals and their habitats.
Barry writes about their early relationship:
“While I was working at the Toronto Humane Society as the wildlife expert, Liz had just been hired to promote the society’s work, and I’d been told that she would present my own work to the press. No way, I said! I was convinced that my own work requires the kind of knowledge that Liz, trained as a nurse, could not possibly know.
That was then, and I had no idea at that time who and what Liz really was. In fact, she not only had an immediate grasp of the concepts I needed to convey to the media, but she was the master of the soundbite, on call 24/7, with her beeper always within reach in those pre-cellphone days. Her work ethic exceeded my own, and everyone else’s, and few days went by when there was not a pro-animal story in the news.
In my long life I have met many of the best-known names in the world of animal protection and not one has made as deep an impression on me as Liz White, in terms of her overall dedication and efficacy. How often have I seen her sit across from highly paid, highly educated experts and calmly dismantle their arguments, and how often have I seen her opponents express, however grudgingly, admiration for her. She became the rock in my life, my greatest confidant whom I love and respect and believe is most deserving of this or any award for her work on behalf of animals.”
A Life-time of Work for Animals:
Barry expresses what so many of us feel for Liz – genuine love and a deep admiration for her unique and generous character, and for her dedication to saving animals. Her work ethic is impressive. Working six and even seven-day weeks has been her norm for decades.
More than a decade ago, I met Liz White when she came to my community, London, to assist us in stopping a proposed cull of deer. In one of our early conversations, I asked her what she thought we can realistically achieve when the exploitation and persecution of animals is so deeply embedded in the economic life of Canada. Her answer was that we should never become discouraged at the enormity of the problem but to always know that we can, and do, ‘reduce the body count’ of animals, as we had just done in London where a deer cull had been prevented. She said that we should always value and celebrate the lives of every animal saved, recognizing the importance of those lives to the animals themselves.
Those words still resonate with me when I become discouraged. We, our supporters, and all of our allies across the planet, are indeed ‘reducing the body count’. Every time that we achieve a legislative win, such as the Cruelty-Free legislation that saves countless animals from torment and death for the testing of cosmetics, we have reduced the body count. Every deer or goose cull, or beaver-trapping program that is stopped or prevented, saves the lives of animals now, and in the future. And Liz White has been instrumental in so many of these successes.
Please join us in celebrating this well-deserved recognition of Liz White, a visionary leader who has played, and continues to play, a significant role in saving the lives of animals, today and in the future, in Canada.
Congratulations Liz! We look forward to all of the transformative work that you will do in the coming years.
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