The Next Era of Animal Welfare Leadership. And the Lottery We Keep Losing

Every year in Canada, one of the country’s largest animal-welfare charities receives the equivalent of a major lottery prize. Not figuratively. Its annual budget, roughly fifty million donated dollars, functions as a renewable jackpot for animal services. Most of us imagine that if we ever won that kind of windfall, we’d use it to tackle the problems we care about most: ensuring safety for children, supporting families, or creating real change for animals.

Yet despite this enormous and predictable pool of funding, the biggest structural animal-health and public-safety challenges across the province do not meaningfully shrink. Remote, rural, and Indigenous communities still lack consistent access to veterinary care, prevention programs, and the basic tools that urban centres have benefited from for more than a century. These are the communities that bear the heaviest consequences: heightened child dog-bite risk, unmanaged roaming dog populations, recurring fear-based responses like culls, and public-health inequities that affect both people and animals.

So how can an organization win a fifty-million-dollar lottery every year and still leave the province’s most urgent animal-health issues essentially untouched?

To answer that, we need to return to the origins of the SPCA movement, and then look forward to what kind of leadership the next era requires.

The first SPCAs in Canada were not built as public-health institutions. They emerged from nineteenth-century Protestant moral-reform movements, the same ideological currents that shaped residential school policy and other colonial initiatives aimed at “civilizing” populations deemed in need of supervision. These early SPCAs were created in cities, funded by urban donors, and embedded within the social structures of the time.

Meanwhile, First Nations were being displaced, economically restricted, and governed under the Indian Act, which prevented them from raising taxes, building municipal infrastructure, or controlling their own budgets while settlers profited from their lands. In that context, the absence of animal-control systems, population-management resources, and attainable veterinary services in Indigenous communities today is not due to community apathy, despite common stereotypes, but is the direct result of historical policy design. Communities were structurally prevented from building what cities built for themselves.

Modern British Columbia still reflects this uneven landscape. The problem is not that large animal-welfare charities have big budgets. The problem is what those budgets are structured to do, and what they are not. These organizations have no legislated or structural mandate to serve rural or Indigenous communities equitably. They carry no legislative responsibility for province-wide animal-health prevention or community-level public-safety infrastructure. They are not designed or funded as public-health agencies, even though their work intersects with public safety. They are urban charities with powerful brands, donor monopolies, and enormous gravitational pull.

That gravitational pull shapes everything. Many Canadians assume the “big SPCA” model is the province-wide authority on animal health, yet, in many cases, the most severe crises are addressed by small nonprofits, Indigenous-led initiatives, and community groups operating on budgets that would barely register as a rounding error in a $50 million operation.

To be clear, large animal-welfare charities in B.C. have contributed meaningfully in certain moments. During the pandemic, they provided supplies to remote Indigenous communities facing restricted access, and past grant programs have supported spay/neuter and community-cat care on First Nations land. These efforts deserve acknowledgment. But they remain episodic, voluntary, and charitable in nature, not part of a legislated, province-wide mandate to ensure equitable access to animal-health services. The gap between important charitable outreach and structural public-health responsibility is precisely the problem.

The result is a province-wide inequity: a disproportionate share of philanthropic dollars flows to the organizations with the strongest brand visibility, not to the communities with the greatest need. Groups such as Increased ACCESS with the Indigenous SPCA project, and other rural or Indigenous-led efforts work with far smaller resources yet consistently deliver high-impact interventions in the places where gaps are deepest.

Large organizations occasionally distribute awards to acknowledge these efforts. But a plaque doesn’t pay for veterinary supplies, staff, prevention programs, or the logistical realities of serving remote communities. Symbolic recognition without resource redistribution only reinforces the imbalance.

This brings us to leadership.

The long tenure of outgoing leaders in the big provincial animal-welfare charities has often been credited with stabilizing their organizations, and that deserves acknowledgment. But stability is not the same as equity. The next era of leadership cannot simply reproduce the same model.

What British Columbia’s animals and communities need now is public-health leadership, not charity leadership.

Animal management is a disproportionate social determinant of human health in Indigenous communities. Dog-bite prevention is child-injury prevention. Access to veterinary care is community safety. And in many communities, roaming dogs are not behavioural failures; they are evidence of historical harms and systemic underinvestment.

Leading in this context requires cultural literacy, equity literacy, meaningful engagement with Indigenous Nations, and the humility to collaborate rather than dominate the sector.

A 21st-century leader for a major provincial animal-welfare organization must be willing to redirect resources toward the communities with the highest need, not the communities with the highest donor visibility. They should be prepared to decentralize authority instead of consolidate it. They should view a fifty-million-dollar annual budget as a public responsibility with province-wide consequences. They should centre measurable community outcomes, not institutional visibility. They should see their institution not as an urban charity with provincial aspirations, but as a potential anchor for a province-wide public-health approach to animal services.

British Columbia could have an animal-welfare system that genuinely reduces suffering, one where communities outside cities receive the same access to veterinary care as urban adopters, where the deepest gaps are addressed rather than avoided, and where historical inequities are acknowledged and corrected rather than reproduced.

But this depends entirely on leadership.

It depends on whether the next generation of leaders see this moment for what it is: a chance to reimagine animal welfare in British Columbia. And it depends on whether we are finally ready to ask a simple but urgent question:

If we truly had a fifty-million-dollar animal-welfare jackpot every single year, what would it look like to finally start winning?