By: Barry Kent MacKay, Honourary Director
Recently The Narwhal, an email newsletter that specializes in environmental issues, posted a series of 26 environmentally bad policy decisions made by the provincial government of Ontario under the leadership of Premier Doug Ford. There are many other such critiques dealing with fiscally or socially deleterious decisions made by Ford since he became premier of Ontario in 2018, or since winning a second term in 2022.
The list is not comprehensive. All such lists seem to leave out three decisions that lead me to believe that while Ford either does not understand, or cares little about, the environment, he must hate animals. There are serious animal welfare policies Ford has enacted in addition to the list of 26 related decisions that authors Emma McIntosh and Fatima Syed presented on January 29th[1]. Like the Narwhal list, and other inventories of decisions Ford has made that led to waste, broken promises, and scandals[2], there is a commonality that inevitably leads to comparisons with U.S. President Donald Trump, minus the power, the insanity, and the orange makeup that characterizes Trump. To his chagrin, Ford was recently caught admitting his admiration for Trump[3] .
Both leaders tend to ignore and expunge expert opinion. They know best, period. In issues like climate change and tariffs, for example, we have seen President Trump ignore or criticize the collective expertise of virtually all climate scientists and economists, respectively. Ford has similar proclivities.
Late in 2019, Ford’s government tabled Bill 138, an omnibus bill covering many unrelated proposals, including removal of that part of the absurdly named Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act that prevented hunters from allowing the meat of the “game” they killed from going to waste. That was so the double-crested cormorant, a species whose flesh is deemed close to inedible, could be declared to be a “game” bird and be hunted with a daily “take” of fifteen birds, all of whom could be discarded.
A wide range of scientists and other “stakeholders” strongly opposed the bill, as did the Ford government’s own scientific advisors, to no avail. Ford made a mockery of the concepts of utilization, conservation, and fair chase that supposedly guide wildlife management policy pertaining to sport hunting. No mechanism was allocated for either monitoring the effects of the hunt on the cormorant population, not to mention the environment overall, or to enforce the absurdly high bag limit of fifteen birds per day, and the stipulation that the wasted bodies must be discarded in a proscribed way. The bill did not appeal to those hunters who value fair chase (cormorants are easily killed), utilization (the bodies could be wasted) and conservation (the numbers of the species in Ontario, recovering from previous endangerment, had levelled off and historically the species is prone to endangerment). But it did appeal to the “slob hunter”, the type who kills for the love of killing, as was made clear by subsequent Facebook postings by cormorant killers who delighted in the act of killing for the sake of killing.
There’s more. In 1999 a previous Conservative government, under Premier Mike Harris, ended the practice of hunting black bears in Ontario during the spring, when sows were emerging from hibernation with their wholly dependent cubs. Although protected, trigger-happy hunters were mistaking the “protected” mother bears for males, and shooting them, leaving cubs to die.
The Conservative government of the day ended the practice, with then Minister of Natural Resources, John Snobelen, saying, “The government made the decision to move to end the spring bear hunt because it will not tolerate cubs being orphaned by hunters mistakenly shooting mother bears in the spring.”
But against all evidence some Ontarians believed that the risk of bear attacks had increased. In 2013 the provincial government was Liberal, and Premier Kathleen Wynne, failing in the polls, went against her own government’s science-based advice and, seeking extra votes from hunters and outfitters, announced a partial reintroduction of the spring hunt. She still lost the election, and we got a Conservative government under Premier Ford, who immediately began overestimating his mandate making many anti-environmental and anti-conservation decisions as described by The Narwhal article.
Ford’s decision to extend the spring bear hunt, opening it to foreign hunters and increasing numbers of bears to be killed in areas of bear population declines, was opposed by his own advisors, whose work and salaries are paid for by us taxpayers. They were ignored. Sows are still protected, still “accidentally” shot, cubs still orphaned, with most failing to survive.
A third Ford change may be the one that most graphically illustrates his cruelty.
In 1997, what is now the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry began to phase out a brutal practice whereby captive wild coyotes, foxes, or rabbits – snowshoe hares – are chased by dogs. If the terrified “prey” can reach cover that is provided – culverts and bolt holes the dogs can’t enter, they survive for another terrifying “training” or “trial” event – the latter a competitive “sport”. If not, they could be torn apart alive.
There are always people who enjoy imposing cruelty – we are the same species who, not so many generations ago, cheered the lions attacking Christians and gladiators in Romon arenas – but civility lies with compassion. In 1997 the government began phasing out this cruel, if little-known, practice, by not allocating licensing for new trial and training facilities. Existing ones were “grandfathered”, meaning they could continue their barbaric practices, but not transfer their licensing to new facilities.
In 2023 Premier Doug Ford changed all that, reinstating the practice in full.
I cannot, and will not, support a man so cruelly barbaric. There is a lot of very technical discussion among researchers as to the nature of compassion, but right or wrong, I value it more than any other human trait, save one: logic. They are not only of equal importance to me, but I believe that their application to human affairs defines civility, thus civilization. A body of research has shown that people who are cruel to animals are so often cruel to people[4]. This finding creates a common ground argument against cruelty to animals, but I don’t need that. Suffering is universally unavoidable, but cruelty requires purpose and here at Animal Alliance we oppose cruelty, period.
[1] https://thenarwhal.ca/ontario-election-2025-environmental-policy/
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-election-doug-ford-campaign-promises-report-card-1.7447912
[3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ford-trump-win-comments-tariffs-1.7449512
[4] https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/the-link-between-animal-cruelty-and-human-violence