Leadership, Systems Change, and Why Canada May Need an Animal Czar

As 2025 draws to a close, one theme has run through every major conversation that the Increased ACCESS team has had across communities, professions, and policy circles: leadership. Who holds it, who should hold it, and what kind of leadership this moment actually requires.

Across our last four blog posts, a podcast, a national article in Healthy Debate, and a feature in West Coast Veterinarian, Increased ACCESS examined an uncomfortable truth: Canada has never had a coherent animal-health or animal-safety system, because we have never fully understood animal health as a One Health issue shaped by public health, child safety, infrastructure, racism, and 150 years of federal policy design. By allowing the delivery of most animal welfare functions to remain in the charitable realm, rather than recognizing community animal management as a determinant of human health, Canada enabled an inequitable system where Indigenous communities were left with disproportionate risk while urban centres built systems that served their own needs.

Yet 2025 also revealed something else that is equally important: communities are leading anyway. Nations are writing bylaws, building infrastructure, organizing mobile vet clinics, and shaping trauma and bite prevention strategies with Elders and Knowledge Keepers. The Assembly of First Nations signaled this shift nationally by passing a 2024 resolution to develop a National Strategy on Animal Care and Control in First Nations, a significant step toward Indigenous-led coordination. What is missing now is a model of national alignment that can sit alongside that work and ensure Canada’s broader systems are capable of meeting the same moment.

As we enter the final weeks of the year, it is clearer than ever that the work of Increased ACCESS and the Indigenous SPCA is not about animals alone. It is about public health, child safety, equity, and the social-justice implications of systems Canada never built. It is about a sector that still treats animal welfare as separate from the determinants of human health, and about the urgent need to bridge those worlds.

Which leads to the question this piece ends on. Canada has begun appointing national leads, even a czar, to coordinate fragmented and multi-jurisdictional crises. A national fentanyl czar was appointed in February for exactly this reason. If we acknowledge that animal health, public health, community safety, and social justice are deeply interconnected, then Canada must ask:

Why not establish an animal czar, someone mandated to connect the dots across siloed ministries, levels of government, public-health systems, and the charitable sector, to bring coherence to a system whose fragmentation has real consequences for children, families, and communities?

The Fifty-Million-Dollar Question: What Is Leadership For?

Our last blog examined why Canada’s most prominent animal-welfare charities, supported by well over fifty million dollars in donated funds each year, have not meaningfully shifted the inequities that fall hardest on remote and Indigenous communities. These institutions were created over a century ago while municipal animal-control systems for growing urban populations were modernizing, at the same moment when Canada had a fiduciary duty to develop animal-management and public-health infrastructure for First Nations communities. That duty went unfulfilled. Because their priorities still reflect their urban origins rather than a province-wide equity lens or a full One Health mandate, animal-welfare charities’ services and investments continue to follow population density, donor geography, and institutional visibility rather than the communities living with the greatest animal-related public-health and safety risk.

This raises a quiet but consequential question: is serving small and remote communities seen as inefficient? And if so, what does efficiency really mean in a sector confronting the downstream effects of 150 years of federal policy, racism, and chronic underinvestment?

The deeper truth is this. If the purpose of animal welfare is to improve the lives of animals, then the sector must be willing to engage with the public-health realities of animal issues, especially in communities that were structurally prevented from building the systems cities built over a century ago. Meaningful animal care that actually reduces suffering requires understanding and addressing the conditions that shape it.

“Inefficient” to Whom? Reframing Access to Veterinary Care

In another post, we explored a well-intentioned but revealing misunderstanding. A major charitable funder described supporting mobile veterinary care to serve remote Indigenous communities as inefficient, applying an urban lens that simply does not fit much of the Canadian context. They quickly learned that geography, remoteness, and policy design make mobile care not an inefficiency but an inevitability.

But the deeper issue is a lack of cultural literacy, and it extends far beyond one organization. Much of the philanthropy sector, many animal-welfare institutions, and a large portion of the Canadian public still do not understand how federal policy, racism, and chronic underinvestment prevented Indigenous communities from building the animal-management and public-health systems that settler towns funded with municipal taxes. Without that literacy, today’s animal issues are easily misread as local problems or moral failures, when in reality they are the predictable outcomes of a system never designed with Indigenous communities in mind.

Healthy Debate: Bringing a Public-Health Truth to a National Audience

We also have a post summarizing our Healthy Debate article, which brought this message into mainstream health discourse: animal health is a public-health issue, and community animal management is a disproportionate social determinant of human health in Indigenous communities.

The article made visible what many communities have experienced for generations. Without basic infrastructure including access to spay and neuter surgeries, animal vaccinations, dog kennels, and prevention programs, dog-bite risk and trauma fall most heavily on children, particularly in places where access to a veterinary clinic may require a plane or a boat.

Crucially, the Healthy Debate article also highlighted what is changing. Nations are designing their own solutions. Invited mobile vet clinics are driving, flying, and barging into remote regions. Safe and affordable dog-housing structures are being built. Elders and Knowledge Keepers are shaping proactive approaches to community animal management. Early data shows that when communities finally have the tools they were historically denied, the results are transformative.

“James Harriot Is Dead”: A Profession in Transition

Then there is our post linked to the West Coast Veterinarian feature, which examined how the nostalgic James Harriot vision of veterinary care never matched the realities of rural and remote Indigenous communities. It underscored that the profession is beginning to understand the structural, emotional, and logistical demands of delivering care in places that were never included in the design of Canada’s animal-health systems.

But this emerging awareness also points to what must come next. Canada must accelerate the seeding of a non-profit veterinary sector, much of it necessarily mobile, and move beyond a model that relies on volunteer teams and philanthropy to deliver what COVID made clear are essential community services. Building this capacity will require policy tools such as provincial loan-forgiveness programs to support new veterinary graduates to work in non-profit clinics serving remote communities, fully paid and professionally supported rather than volunteering.

Taken together, these writings form one narrative: the system we have was never built for equity. The system we need requires leadership capable of building something new.

A Year of Cross-Sector Momentum

2025 brought major progress:

• A national health-policy article reframing this issue for the first time.

• A vet sector magazine feature article challenging the narratives that hold the old system in place.

• New community-led initiatives in Nations we work alongside.

• Growing conversations with philanthropy-focused teams about shifting from symptom funding to systems funding.

• Multi-sector collaboration with public health, economics, Indigenous governance, and veterinary partners through the early stages of developing a Community Animal Management Outcomes Fund.

• And more is still ahead as momentum accelerates.

All of this points to something important: leadership is emerging in communities, professions, and policy circles. What is missing is a structure that connects them.

Canada Appointed a Fentanyl Czar. Why Not an Animal Czar?

In early 2025, Canada appointed a national lead, a czar, to coordinate the country's response to the fentanyl crisis. The logic was clear. Multiple ministries, jurisdictions, and systems were touching the issue, no single authority could solve it, leadership was fragmented, and lives were at risk.

And the human-health and community-safety impacts created by uncoordinated animal-related systems are no different.

Right now:

• The federal government plays only a minimal and inconsistent role, despite its long-standing fiduciary responsibilities to First Nations and its oversight of public health, animal movement, and national coordination.

• Provinces house animal issues within Ministries of Agriculture, even for dogs and cats.

• Municipalities manage bylaws and animal control.

• Indigenous Nations navigate federal underfunding and legislative barriers.

• SPCAs and humane societies largely operate as powerful but urban-focused charities.

• Volunteers and philanthropy fill some gaps.

• No coordination mechanism exists across these systems.

• No minimum-service expectations exist for communities.

• No equity lens governs resource distribution.

This is not a system. It is a patchwork.

A national animal czar could:

• Bring federal, provincial, municipal, and Indigenous governments into one coordinated One Health framework.

• Establish minimum standards for access to animal-health and animal-safety infrastructure that impacts public health.

• Ensure that child safety and community wellbeing guide resource allocation, not donor geography.

• Move essential services out of the realm of charity and into the realm of public responsibility.

• Support the development of Indigenous-led animal-management systems across the country.

• Build the policy, economic, and public-health structures that communities have lacked for 150 years.

Canada has already shown a willingness to appoint a czar when fragmented systems need coherence. This is another of those moments.

Looking Ahead: Leadership in 2026

If 2025 was the year Canadians began to see animal-health inequity as a public-health issue, then 2026 must be the year we begin building the structures that make real solutions possible.

Communities are leading. Indigenous Nations are designing bylaws, shaping prevention strategies, hosting mobile clinics, and advancing their own models of animal health and safety. The Assembly of First Nations has already committed to a National Strategy on Animal Care and Control in First Nations. Cross-sector partners are stepping forward. Philanthropy is shifting. The policy conversation is opening.

What Canada needs now is leadership that can match the leadership already emerging in communities. Not as charity. Not as episodic outreach. As public health.

So perhaps the boldest question is not whether Canada should appoint an animal czar. The deeper question is this:

If Indigenous communities are already leading the way, when will Canada build the national structures required to follow their lead?

There are steps the federal government can take right now that cost little but signal real commitment. These include the three actions we recently shared in conversation with federal policymakers:

1. Support the development phase of a national Community Animal Management Outcomes Fund. This would be a small, time-limited investment focused on designing the outcomes framework with Indigenous partners and economists. The University of Winnipeg's Economics team is already engaged. It would allow the federal government to adopt or scale the model later, without committing operational dollars now.

   
   

2. Provide federal support to the Assembly of First Nations as it advances a National Strategy for Animal Care and Control in First Nations. AFN Chiefs have already passed resolutions calling for this work. Supporting AFN to lead the process respects Indigenous jurisdiction, aligns with self-determination, and gives communities a coherent, Nation-led pathway forward.

   
   

3. Issue federal guidance recognizing community animal management as a public-health issue, not an animal-welfare issue. Key government programs could produce joint guidance clarifying that communities may use existing capital or community-safety funding streams for animal-related infrastructure. This reframing costs nothing but removes longstanding structural barriers.

   
   

These practical, low-cost steps would begin aligning federal policy with the leadership Indigenous communities are already demonstrating.

And for everyone asking how to support solutions in 2026, more will be shared in the months ahead. We will be inviting partners to engage with the Community Animal Management Outcomes Fund, an Indigenous-led effort designed to move essential services out of the realm of charity and into the realm of sustainable public responsibility.

If 2026 is the year Canada finally begins to align national systems with the leadership already shown by communities, then it can also be the year we stop relying on charity to deliver community animal management and start treating it as public health.