The Biggest Tree Is Still Not the Forest

One organization cannot represent the whole system. Charity cannot substitute for public responsibility.

An open letter to the Board and supporters of the BC SPCA, and to those seeking to govern British Columbia

Once upon a time, British Columbia built an animal-care system without ever deciding to build one. In growing towns and cities, pieces appeared over generations: bylaws and pounds, animal-control officers, veterinary practices, humane societies and SPCAs, provincial law, donors and volunteers. No one body designed the whole, but where enough pieces accumulated, they came to feel like an ordinary feature of modern life.

First Nations were living through a very different history. While municipalities developed tax bases, public infrastructure and local service systems, the Indian Act and other colonial policies constrained First Nations governments, economies and control over resources. Animal management was rarely recognized or funded as essential community infrastructure, so many Nations, particularly in rural and remote areas, did not receive the same foundation of facilities, trained staff, veterinary access and sustained local capacity.

That absence should not be mistaken for an absence of knowledge, care or responsibility. Nations have their own rules, relationships, local knowledge and people who step forward. What has often been missing are the public systems, infrastructure and resources needed to make that local knowledge actionable and sustainable. 

The consequences are easy to misread because the visible problem is often an animal or an individual decision. Why was the dog not contained? Why did the family not obtain veterinary care? Why did the Nation not enforce its rules? Those questions become misleading when they are separated from the conditions around them. A family cannot use a service that does not exist or is hundreds of kilometres away. A Nation cannot sustain enforcement without trained staff, facilities, transport, veterinary access and reliable funding. Rules without the means to follow through are not a functioning system. When infrastructure is missing, individuals and communities can be blamed for conditions that absent or disconnected systems helped create.

Charities and volunteers often step into those gaps. Supplies arrive, a short-term grant is awarded, or a clinic is held. Each can matter greatly to the animals and families reached. The problem is not the help. The problem is what happens when intermittent help becomes the closest thing a community has to a system. The immediate pressure eases, but local capacity may remain unchanged and public responsibility may remain unclear. A gap can be managed repeatedly without ever being solved.

That is one of the uncomfortable limits of philanthropy. Charity is good at responding to needs that donors can see and organizations are equipped to address. It is much less suited to guaranteeing that every community has the infrastructure, continuity and accountability needed to prevent predictable harm. Volunteerism can strengthen a public system. Philanthropy can accelerate one. Neither is a fair substitute for one.

Into this uneven landscape, the BC SPCA grew. It protected animals, built shelters and hospitals, developed expertise, raised extraordinary sums of money and earned the trust of generations of supporters. The organization now describes itself as the largest animal-welfare organization of its kind in North America, and its latest annual report shows almost $70 million in annual revenue. This is not an argument that the BC SPCA should be smaller. A large, capable institution can do extraordinary good. But scale changes the effect an institution has on the landscape around it.

The BC SPCA may not believe it is the whole animal-care system, but much of the public appears to experience it that way. Many people do not know that SPCAs are separate, independent organizations rather than branches of one national or international body. The familiar phrase “the SPCA” can make one organization appear to encompass an entire field. Other SPCAs, rural organizations, informal networks, Indigenous-led initiatives and community-led systems can disappear from public view. Donors may assume the need is already covered. Governments and media may turn repeatedly to the largest organization and mistake its perspective for the perspective of the whole field.

The BC SPCA did not necessarily set out to create that misunderstanding. But an institution of this scale has some responsibility for correcting it. Smaller animal-welfare organizations serving rural communities have received BC SPCA awards for extending care beyond the BC SPCA's reach. The recognition is welcome. Yet at least one such award was, quite literally, a small plastic trophy. It went home to the same thin budget, aging equipment and long travel distances. A trophy can acknowledge the edge of a large institution's reach; it cannot pay for the work beyond it. Recognition is not redistribution, and visibility is not capacity.

A dominant institution can strengthen the wider system when it uses its money, infrastructure, donor relationships, public attention and government access to help others become more durable without absorbing or controlling them. It can make other organizations easier to see. It can direct supporters toward work outside its mandate. It can tell government that consultation with the BC SPCA is not consultation with the whole field. And it can use its influence to say, sometimes, that a need should no longer depend on charity at all.

That is why two leadership decisions happening now matter together. The BC SPCA is searching for its first new chief executive in nearly a quarter-century, while voters are choosing British Columbia's next government.

These decisions belong to different institutions, but they meet at a boundary British Columbia has never clearly drawn: where does charitable leadership end and public responsibility begin? The BC SPCA has become large enough to carry expectations far beyond the mandate of any one charity. At the same time, governments have been able to rely on that scale and visibility, and on the wider charitable sector, without fully building, connecting or reforming the public systems communities need.

One decision therefore concerns how a powerful charity should lead within a wider system. The other concerns whether government will accept the responsibilities that charity cannot carry. The BC SPCA can become a stronger, more collaborative participant in that system, but it cannot legitimately represent or replace it. The Province, in turn, cannot point to the existence of a large charity as evidence that public responsibility has been met.

For the BC SPCA Board, this should make the leadership search bigger than succession. After almost a quarter-century under one chief executive, the familiar response may be to search for another exceptional individual. But the organization now works where animal protection, veterinary medicine, public health, relationships with Indigenous Nations, community infrastructure, enforcement, philanthropy and government policy intersect. The Board should at least test the assumption that one person is still the right leadership architecture. Perhaps a shared or distributed model could give different forms of knowledge genuine authority rather than arranging them around one chief executive as advisers.

But even an outstanding leadership team would still lead only one independent charity, accountable to its own Board, mandate, supporters and institutional interests. That is appropriate. The next leadership should therefore understand the limits of the institution as clearly as its strengths: when to lead, when to support, when to share resources, when to make room for others, and when to say that a problem should no longer depend on charity. 

The provincial question is different but connected. British Columbia already has animal-related systems: laws, ministries, local governments, animal-control services, veterinary professionals, charities, other SPCAs and Nation-led initiatives. The problem is not that nothing exists. It is that the pieces were built at different times, for different purposes and with very different reach. Some work well. Some need to change. Some need to be connected. Some pieces needed for prevention are still missing.

The broader work of reconciliation points in the same direction. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and British Columbia's Declaration Act all challenge governments and institutions to reconsider inherited relationships and structures, not simply extend existing systems unchanged and call that reconciliation. One Health adds another lens: human, animal and environmental health are connected, yet government responsibilities remain divided into portfolios that often see only their own piece.

A child's injury may enter a health record while fear, restricted movement, missed school and repeated threatening encounters remain outside the picture. A community may know exactly where the risks are, yet that knowledge may never be heard by an institution with the authority and budget to act. Costs can be carried by families, schools, health services, Nations, local governments and charities without ever being assembled into one public account of what is happening and why. Predictable harms are then treated as unrelated crises rather than foreseeable consequences of disconnected or missing systems. When responsibility is divided among enough institutions, a problem can become visible everywhere and owned nowhere.

Where animal-related services protect health and safety, their existence should not depend on a charity raising enough money, a community winning the right grant, or volunteers carrying responsibilities that governments have left behind. We understand this principle in fire protection. We would not wait until a child is burned before deciding that supporting a local volunteer fire department is a good idea. Nor should a child have to be seriously injured by a dog before a known animal-management gap becomes public business. Predictable harms should lead to prevention, not another round of crisis response.

British Columbia therefore needs an independent public mechanism capable of seeing across the whole landscape. One possible form is an Office of the Commissioner for Animal Care and Community Safety, supported by cross-ministry participation, a standing system council and a distinct Indigenous Nations governance mechanism with real authority. The purpose would not be to create one more institution that claims to speak for everyone. It would be to create a publicly accountable place where the pieces are required to meet.

Such an office could map services, authority, information, funding and gaps; hear directly from Nations and communities; bring ministries, professions and organizations together; clarify responsibility; recommend sustained investment; and report publicly on whether preventable harms are actually declining. Indigenous Nations would need to help design and govern this work as governments and rights holders, not be invited later as one stakeholder group among many.

A companion post, Who Sees the Whole Picture?, develops that proposal in more detail.

A tree can grow so large that it dominates the skyline, shelters generations of life and shapes everything around it. It can become the feature by which people recognize the entire landscape. But even the biggest tree is not the forest.

The BC SPCA's next leadership should understand that distinction and use the organization's extraordinary strength to help the wider ecosystem become more visible and more durable.

The next provincial government must understand the companion truth: a healthy system cannot depend on one institution, however large or accomplished, or on philanthropy and goodwill alone.

The work before us is not to start again. It is to see the whole landscape clearly, change what perpetuates inequity, connect what has been fragmented, and build what is still missing. It is to turn the patchwork into a system.

Sincerely,

James Rodgers

Executive Director

Increased ACCESS