Not the pals they once were

For years, what Ontario hunters wanted, the Ontario government gave them. Then, the Tories cancelled the spring bear hunt

ILLUSTRATION BY RAFFI ANDERIAN / TORONTO STAR

Low-key and polite, yet by all accounts devastatingly effective, the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH) is a familiar player in the back rooms of government.

The provincial government stocked lakes so that fishermen could fish them. It even introduced elk to Ontario in 1998 so that, when numbers were sufficient, hunters could shoot them.

Unlike its cousin to the south, the more flamboyant and controversial U.S. National Rifle Association, the Ontario group usually managed to get its way without raising its voice.

When Ottawa unveiled its new gun control legislation in 1995, OFAH objected. But it did not fly off at the mouth. Instead, it mobilized its 82,000 members and quietly lobbied the Ontario government, which responded by announcing that it would support a court challenge to the bill.

But now things have changed. To the dismay of OFAH, its best friends - the Mike Harris Tories - have betrayed it. Under pressure from animal supporters employing a new and more effective form of political pressure, the Tories banned the spring bear hunt last year.

"It changed the playing field,'' says Rick Morgan, for 24 years the federation's vice-president and, as chief paid employee, its driving force.

And while the federation is not giving up its old, quiet lobbying tactics, it has been forced to add a new weapon to its arsenal.

It is going public in a way it has never done before.

In particular, the federation has involved itself in two high-profile issues. It has hired Toronto lawyer Tim Danson to challenge the constitutionality of banning the spring bear hunt. That case is to be heard in June.

And it has hired Danson's brother Peter, also a lawyer, to spearhead its attack against the federal government's new animal cruelty bill.

In both cases, the federation is fighting less the governments than the people it sees as sworn enemies - animal supporters, the people OFAH calls "the antis.''

In the constitutional case, Tim Danson says that a ban on killing bears each spring infringes the freedom of hunters to express themselves.

In the animal cruelty issue, Peter Danson says that federal Justice Minister Anne McLellan's Bill C-17 would make it illegal for fishermen to impale worms on hooks. (McLellan's lawyers dispute this.)

The federation has already taken on Ottawa over its gun-control laws. But its public attack on an Ontario government - particularly on an Ontario Tory government - is highly unusual.

And it does appear to have miffed the Harrisites.

"It's been a pretty deep relationship over the years,'' says John Snobelen, Ontario's minister of natural resources, choosing his words carefully. "This (the court case) doesn't end all that, but it makes it more awkward.''

Still, to the federation, the principle is important enough to risk the wrath of its friends. It has decided that it is in a fight for its life. As Morgan puts it, the province has become more urban and more culturally diverse. And this is bad news for hunters, most of whom are rural, male and white.

"Many new Canadians come from places where there is no tradition of hunting,'' explains Morgan. "They do not have the same heritage.''

As a result, he notes, the proportion of the population which hunts is declining fast. Statistics suggest there are probably more birdwatchers than bird hunters. So in OFAH's fight to save hunting, all stops have been pulled.

"It's safe to say we need to express our views more often,'' he says. "(Before) it was generally acknowledged by everybody that hunting and fishing were fine. But now we're in an era when some people think we should be just vegetarians.''

When OFAH started in 1928, it, like the NRA, was one of the closest things North America had to an organized conservation group.

Logically speaking, their reasons for conservation may have been odd. Both OFAH and the NRA supported conserving species so their members could later kill them. But the fishermen and hunters who stocked lakes and supported wilderness areas were among the environmentalists of their time.

Gradually, the federation and the government bureaucracy it lobbied became so entwined as to be virtually indistinguishable. It is no accident that both the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) and OFAH have headquarters in Peterborough. It was, as one senior Ontario government figure said, ``as much an entanglement as a relationship.''

"They're not a normal lobby group,'' says Rob Sinclair, of the International Federation for Animal Welfare and an admiring critic. ``They're more like your mother- in-law. They just move in.''

Morgan puts it more simply: "We think where MNR wants to go and we want to go is often the same place.''

The result was that, on resource policy, the government was pulled by a troika of interests: mining companies, forestry giants and OFAH.

The first two had money. But OFAH represented voters. And though it was careful not to explicitly endorse any political party lest it jeopardize its status as a federally registered charity, it made its views known - both in its newsletters and privately to MPPs on its occasional fishing junkets.

"A potent lobby,'' recalls Bud Wildman, who was natural resources minister under the former New Democratic government.

Indeed, in government circles, OFAH's Morgan is usually referred to as the unofficial deputy minister of natural resources.

"We try to get involved,'' he explains.

Until last spring, no one treated OFAH with more deference than the Harris Tories.

Even as they slashed money for hospitals and the poor, the Tories increased spending on OFAH priorities such as fish stocking. Beginning with Harris' first natural resources minister, Chris Hodgson, the government moved to meet key OFAH demands.

Game laws were changed to make it an offence for anyone to interfere with a hunter - or even to scare away game that a hunter was stalking. This was designed to head off any protests in the bush by animal supporters. Hunter education was, in effect, privatized and handed to OFAH.

But two of the Harris reforms were key. First, the government segregated all money earned from hunting and fishing licences in a special-purpose account - to be spent only on projects of benefit to hunters and fishermen. This insulated government spending on OFAH priorities from the cuts being implemented in the rest of the system.

Second, it set up a wildlife and fish advisory board - comprised mainly of hunters and anglers - to tell government how to spend this money.

By 1998, OFAH was pressuring Queen's Park to beef up the powers of this board and transform it into an independent commission, separate from government and comprised, in large part, of people elected by hunters and fishermen.

The commission would then have the sole power to determine how to spend government hunting and fishing revenues. In effect, it would mark a devolution of power from government to hunters and fishermen themselves - that is, to OFAH.

All was going well until two things happened. Snobelen replaced Hodgson. And the "antis'' devised a bold new tactic.

So-called non-consumptive users of wildlife - hikers, canoeists, birdwatchers - have become far more important numerically and economically than hunters and fishermen.

According to figures prepared by a federal-provincial task force, the percentage of Canadians who hunt fell from 9.8 per cent in 1981 to a mere 5.1 by 1996. Perhaps more important, hikers, canoeists and the like were spending four times as much money on wildlife-related activities as hunters and fishermen.

Like the NRA in the U.S., OFAH is working hard to counter this trend. It offers special programs to attract more females to this male-dominated activity.

And, like the NRA, OFAH has recognized the importance of hooking children early. In 1998, under pressure from the federation, the Ontario government lowered the hunting age from 15 to 12. Officially, it was billed as a safety measure, to educate youngsters in safe hunting practices. But Morgan acknowledges that the move may also "result in increased hunter recruitment'' among the young.

The federation's attempt this year to distribute an OFAH/NRA hunting safety guide to high school students can be seen as part of the same strategy. But even as the federation was shifting, its opponents were moving faster. By the 1990s, animal-rights and animal-welfare organizations had become more sophisticated.

And their fundamental argument - that wild animals deserved better than being killed for sport - began to have more resonance in the general population.

By 1998, several animal-support groups combined in what would turn out to be a most effective political effort. Front and centre was the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which had cut its teeth fighting the Canadian seal hunt.

Backed by $2 million from industrialist Robert Schad and spearheaded by experienced political organizers such as former Snobelen aide Rob Sinclair, the campaign scared the daylights out of the Harris Tories.

With an election due, the organizations targeted eight vulnerable Tory ridings in the Niagara Peninsula and launched a massive media campaign. Grisly videos of the spring bear hunt, a sport in which hunters crouch near pots of meat hung in the woods to attract unwary animals, were widely circulated.

The message was simple: Unless Harris acted on the bear hunt, the animal campaigners would siphon off just enough votes in the upcoming election to defeat his most vulnerable MPPs.

Snobelen insists that this campaign played little part in his surprise decision to cancel the spring bear hunt. He says the government was moved simply by its desire to end a practice that resulted in too many orphaned cubs.

Whatever. Certainly, OFAH saw the government's move as a turning point, one which, for it, created a dangerous precedent. Snobelen had introduced the idea of morality to hunting.

It was one thing to regulate hunting to conserve a species so that more could be killed later. It was entirely another to regulate hunting so as not to be mean to the animals.

And so OFAH launched its constitutional challenge, arguing that unless Ontarians were allowed to hunt bears in the spring (the fall bear hunt is still legal), their entire identity - their very sense of self - would be at risk.

"When I think of who I am, I think of myself as being a hunter,'' says Morgan. "It's how I commune with nature.''

Queen's Park has promised a law recognizing hunting as a heritage activity. Morgan insists it won't mean much practically. But Theresa McClenaghan, a lawyer for the Canadian Environmental Law Association, says it could have real teeth, particularly if it were worded so as to override existing provincial laws.

Last summer, the government opened the way for hunting in at least four wilderness parks previously closed to the activity. This, too, had all the earmarks of a classic OFAH win - privately negotiated and never publicly announced (it became news only when an environmental group noticed the change seven months later).

In August, Harris will host a symposium on North America's hunting heritage, a gung-ho annual event imported from the U.S. Around this time, says Snobelen, the government will probably announce how far it is willing to support OFAH's plan to take over all fish and wildlife management in the province.

So, on the face of it, things look good for Ontario's premier lobby group. But its opponents - and even some of its friends - think that, in the long run, it is doomed.

This is an industry that is grasping at anything it can. . . '' says Liz White of Animal Alliance of Canada, one of the participants in the campaign to end the spring bear hunt. ``But the politicians are beginning to understand that, in the end, we're only talking about 5 per cent of the population.''

A senior figure in the Harris government who is friendly to OFAH puts it this way: "They need to act like more effective spokespeople. It's not enough to stand there in your plaid shirt and say, 'I've got a right to hunt wherever I want.' ''

As long as the federation remained a collection of sporting types in orange vests who occasionally stocked lakes with minnows, most Ontarians thought it was just fine. But the more vocal it gets, the more it reminds Canadians of that other outspoken North American gun lobby - the NRA.

As Morgan acknowledges, the NRA - with its rabid defence of the right of all Americans to be heavily armed - has a bad image in Canada. In fact, it is so negative that Morgan goes out of his way to insist that his organization has nothing whatsoever to do with the NRA.

"We have no relationship (with them) at all. We don't deal with them; we don't know them.''

Why, then, is there an icon on the OFAH Web site that links a user with the NRA's site? At first, Morgan is baffled. "A link? I don't think we do. We'd better not.'' Then he checks his computer.

"You're right. There is something here.... I'm not going to say this is a mistake.... Canadians tend to see the NRA as something they disagree with. But they do good work on hunter safety and conservation.... They have one of the most complete resources for firearms in the world...

"We admire their work on hunter safety education and their work on conservation. I'm not going to say otherwise."

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