Council delays vote on banning shark fins
While Calgary aldermen await the legal fate of Toronto’s beleaguered shark fin ban, they dodged passing their own bylaw and instead created a task force designed to soothe tensions between the animal conservationists and Chinese community activists.
But all of it may be moot in a few weeks, depending on whether Toronto successfully appeals an Ontario judge’s November decision to strike down that city’s ban.
Calgary city solicitor Paul Tolley said the ruling that the Ontario city has no jurisdiction to prohibit shark fins will influence whether Calgary’s bylaw — already approved in principle — can withstand a local legal challenge.
“The Toronto decision would not be binding on (Calgary), but persuasive,” Tolley said Monday during a council break. Toronto city council will decide whether to appeal or drop the matter by late February, he added.
The proposed Calgary by law, which features almost identical wording to Toronto’s, will take effect in July. But now, council hit the pause button until the task force report in May.
In Toronto, as in Calgary, Chinese merchants and community leaders have organized to defend shark fins, a pricey soup ingredient that conservationists argue is cruelly harvested and is driving shark species toward extinction.
One of the Calgary group’s political consultants warned Monday if council passes a ban, they’ll sue to invalidate it.
“Does he (Mayor Naheed Nenshi) want to go to court on an election issue?” asked Donn Lovett, a longtime Liberal campaign organizer, hired alongside Conservative veteran Rod Love to fight against a shark fin bylaw.
An election looms in October. Two aldermen representing large Chinese populations support both the fin ban and delaying the bylaw’s passage while discussing it more in a task force: Ald. Druh Farrell (whose ward includes Chinatown) and Ald. Gael MacLeod (Sandstone).
MacLeod said all sides deplore the ugly practice of finning — tearing fins off live sharks and tossing them back into the ocean to drown.
“As I understand it, in the Chinese community this is a core issue,” she said. “It’s not to say that this can’t change. But cultural change like that — or beliefs and values — they’re not something that change overnight.”
Farrell plans to invite a biologist from the Calgary Zoo to the task force, which will also bring together the proban and anti-ban activists.
“We haven’t all sat around at the table with science-based information and talked about the issue so that the solution comes from us, from the community,” she said.
Richard Poon, spokesman for the Chinese community group, said with most countries banning shark finning, most of the product comes from more humane and properly tracked practices. “Shark fin and finning is two different things,” he said.
He also inflamed the other side Monday, suggesting that shark fin isn’t very different from killing a king crab just for the crab legs.
Ingrid Kuenzel of Shark Fin Free Calgary denounced Poon’s comparison as laughable.
“No individual, no group, no culture and no society has the right to impose an extinction of a species on all humanity,” she said.
It seems that nothing short of a ban will please the Shark Fin Free Calgary group, which says its 11,000 members will refuse to eat at any restaurant that serves the fin soup. Poon, meanwhile, is hoping for compromise and wants to stop seeing Chinese Canadians unfairly blamed for a threat to an animal species.
Ald. Brian Pincott, who first proposed the ban in July, voted against the task force. He had wanted to pass the bylaw Monday, reasoning that all bylaws can face legal challenges.
The Ward 11 alderman helped lead a consultation with the Chinese community last fall, at which he apologized for not properly discussing the shark fin ban with the community earlier.