I was just re-reading the Hansard record of the clause-by-clause voting on Ontario's 'pit bull' ban.  That was where the Committee was stacked in favour of the Liberals and Liberal members who hadn't attended one public hearing or had time to read the materials voted for the government side like good little soldiers.

If you'd like to read the whole thing, scroll down to February 10 at this link.  It takes awhile to wade through it but it's interesting, especially the prophetic comments on Section 19, which was struck down in Superior Court.

Here's an excerpt from the concluding remarks, featuring MPP Joe Tascona (PC Barrie) and MPP Peter Kormos (NDP Welland) to pique your interest. 

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Mr. Tascona: That's something that was lacking from Bill 132, and I thought, having gone through the hearings and the comments made by experts in terms of dealing with responsible dog ownership, the problems that are being faced by municipalities, the steps that should be taken, that the government would take seriously their approach to dealing with dangerous dogs. As Mr. Kormos said, and I agree, you don't need a definition to define what a dangerous dog is. We also heard of measures about spaying and neutering, in terms of aggressive dog behaviour, and how it is affected by that type of procedure.

Yet, with all the hearings we've gone through, there wasn't anything done other than what the Liberal government wants to do here. In describing what a pit bull is, they want to basically attack. They want to basically deal with a litigation-approach system that is not going to have any new information to assist us in terms of how to deal with specific types of breeds, by having a bite prevention strategy or establishing a province-wide dog bite registry, which was taken out of a coroner's inquest. They don't want to look at the basic information you would want to have to make sure you understand the problem you're trying to address

They also know that there are municipalities not enforcing the Dog Owners' Liability Act. So what do they do? They put together a system that' s going to make it even more unattractive for municipalities to want to enforce the Dog Owners' Liability Act by the approach they're taking.

In a court system that is already challenged with respect to court time and people to hear cases, whether they're JPs or judges, what they are also doing is putting in a system that is going to make sure that the courts are brought to a standstill and our dog pounds are going to be full. The basic human measures, in terms of trying to address a problem of protecting the public -- they're putting forth a pit bull ban that is not going to deal with current pit bulls but is going to deal with future breeding patterns, three months from when the bill is going to become law.

So what we've gone through here is an exercise in futility. It's almost what we'd call a public relations stunt that the Attorney General has been going through ever since he decided that he wanted to experiment with pit bulls. I thought we would want to try to do something constructive here, yet we're not doing anything constructive here. We're not addressing responsible dog ownership.

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My friend Mr. Miller talks about licensing. You could put in a process, in terms of working with municipalities, saying, "Listen, this is a process that we can put forth with licensing; this is how we can help you; this is how we can make sure that we deal with responsible dog ownership through proper licensing," rather than saying, "OK, we're going to put together a process that will deal with enforcement of this pit bull ban."

Once you pass this legislation, and I know you're going to do it, then there's going to be a pit bull attack out on the street, and the public's going to say, "What the heck is going on here? I thought that Bill 132 was going to deal with the issue." The false sense of security, the misrepresentation of what this bill is going to do, is not going to change anything. We may be dealing with the same issue with respect to pit bulls for the next 10 to 14 years.

So what did we accomplish by this exercise? You're refusing to deal with anything that is proactive, refusing to address the problem that we have in front of us. I didn't think anyone was coming forth and saying to you, "Let's change the Dog Owners' Liability Act to make it more difficult to deal with in terms of enforcement." No one ever came to you for that.

What you're doing here is, you've got an Attorney General who has backed himself into a corner and doesn't know how to get out of it. He's trapped. He thinks this is going to change things and he's losing; he's balancing his whole reputation, his credibility as an individual. The Attorney General's role is supposed to be to enforce the law, respect the law, protect the rule of law, and he's putting in provisions to support his experiment of identifying a pit bull that are against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Where is the credibility in terms of misleading the public, putting in provisions that are against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and continuing with something that is not going to deal with the problem of vicious dogs?

There's been no attempt to listen to the experts and the presenters about what you could do in a constructive way. I have never seen such an outpouring of people, who are concerned about public safety and concerned about animals, offering their opinions. You couldn't have gotten a better forum. Yet you basically have said on the last day of these hearings, because you're dealing with your amendments, "Let's see how we can address the problem, because we're afraid that we're really going to get hammered if this bill passes and it won't stand up to a charter challenge." That's all this is about. You're afraid that it's not going to stand up to a charter challenge.

We're here on the other side, and we're afraid that it's not going to protect the public from the problem they've been led to believe will be solved by Bill 132. That's why we're here: because we wanted to have a better bill to protect the public from vicious dogs. Yet you haven't listened to the presenters and you haven't listened to us. In fact, there hasn't been one amendment that we've put forward today that you've accepted or even looked at. You haven't brought forth any amendments that deal with the issues that were presented to you in terms of how to deal with this problem realistically and proactively. I'm really disappointed.

I was on the city council in Barrie. We dealt with this. When I first read this, and I read our bylaw back in the early 1990s, when I was there, I looked at the act and it was a joke in terms of trying to enforce, in terms of trying to get some meaningful justice for victims. I thought, when we were going into this exercise, that we were trying to get some meaningful justice for victims, yet we're not going to get that.

When Joan Smith came forth in 1987 and said to George McCague, the MPP for the Alliston area at that time, that pit bull bans wouldn't work, that it was going to cause a delay in court time, that it was going to be a waste of court time because you wouldn't be able to identify it, nobody listened to her. What she said was that she was going to try to change the act to make it better, but that never happened. She said the way to deal with it was to go after vicious dogs. We're all in agreement here that we should be dealing with vicious dogs. But we're not dealing with vicious dogs; we're not dealing with irresponsible owners; we're not dealing with the mechanisms that are impeding proper enforcement. We're not listening to the public. You may be listening to your polls and saying, "Oh, the public supports us." The public believes you're going to solve the pit bull problem now. When that first attack happens to that poor victim, people are going to know that you didn't do anything and that this exercise was a charade. The experiment is not going to work.

I hold the Attorney General to his word that he's not going to add another dog to the banned breed list, but we'll just have to see.

Mr. Kormos: I want to tell the parliamentary assistant that the word is very much out there on the street that cats are your next target -- tagging, leashing, muzzling. If you thought dog people were adamant, wait till the cat lovers come here to Queen's Park. You've never seen anything like cat lovers at Queen's Park.

As I've had occasion to tell this committee, I come from a small to mid-size Ontario town that went through its budget process like other communities are right now. Annually there's an incredible pressure and tension in terms of funding the animal control operation. Once again, our animal control has to deal not only with urban animals, which includes domestic animals, skunks and raccoons, but it has to deal with rural animals. That's not unusual at all. Even in the hobby farming areas, you're going to experience that. We don't have the animal control officers now to deal with routine animal control matters. We've got a pound run by the humane society, SPCA, that is running a perpetual bake sale -- that's how it's done in small-town Ontario -- because of the inadequacy of funding, trying to keep that modest-sized pound operating. They just can't keep up. From time to time, communities across this province, like the one I represent, do blitzes on licensing dogs, but those blitzes are as often as not haphazard and catch-as-may-can. In the summertime, a bunch of students are sent out there to go through neighbourhoods. Of course, dog owners who are scofflaws and have no interest in licensing their dogs have a million and one ways of avoiding licensing their dogs and paying the annual fee.

The Attorney General, Mr. Zimmer's boss, came here last week and tried to make the news by talking about new monies flowing to animal control in municipalities across the province. That was after Mr. McGuinty's other friend, Mr. Rae, talked about the need for $1.3 billion -- what was the amount we need in post-secondary education?

Interjection.

Mr. Kormos: Billions of dollars. That was after Mr. Smitherman talked about the need for monies for health care, notwithstanding 800 nurses and hundreds of other health care workers losing their jobs.

So I don't buy the money argument that Mr Bryant, the Attorney General, makes. This is an expensive process. It's labour-intensive. What makes it most labour intensive is the breed-specific ban, not just in the courtroom now, as we were talking about last round, but out there on the street.

Preventive measures are far less expensive and far more effective because they deal with it before the fact. We heard about programs -- because kids are especially vulnerable to dog bites -- educating kids on fundamental dog behaviour and how to avoid dog bites. We heard about leashing. We heard about not leaving a dog tethered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because that dog is more likely to bite. I presume that meant a dog of any breed. We learned about muzzling and how that was conceivable, but in many cases an impractical approach. We learned about neutering and spaying. But these sorts of things can be done far less costly than enforcement after the fact with far more effective results, and there hasn't been, notwithstanding the pitch made by Mr. Bryant, a commitment of significant monies to communities so animal control officers can get involved in enforcement of this statute, should it become part of the Dog Owners' Liability Act. You've missed the boat.

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