Thank you to all our donors and volunteers for your continued support throughout 2024. Here’s a brief update on our activities and a forecast for 2025.
Our incredible volunteers are the heart of everything we do, and their dedication makes our mission possible. Your time and talents help us create meaningful change for animals and build a compassionate world. Whether your interests lie in outreach, event planning, advocacy, or behind-the-scenes support, we’re committed to finding the perfect place for you within our organization.
To ensure our efforts remain effective and impactful, we encourage volunteers to commit to a consistent level of engagement that aligns with the needs of their role and our mission. Many roles involve a learning curve, so a sustained commitment is required for us to provide thorough training and support while ensuring your contributions have a lasting impact.
If you’re passionate about making a difference, we’d love to welcome you to our team. Together, we can achieve amazing things.
This was one of the most important moments of the year, maybe even of this decade. We had been working on this for many years, and it took the efforts of many people. There were times we thought we might need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on legal representation with no guaranteed outcome, but we are finally done. We once again thank all our supporters and apologize for being unable to backdate our charitable status. We can now refocus our efforts on our charitable purpose instead of defending it.
There is another branch of government that we’ve had issues with for a long time: The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). They are partly responsible for items being labelled as “vegan” that are unsuitable for people who self-identify as such. Unlike what happened for Kosher and Halal foods, they continue to discriminate against people who self-identify as vegan by defining for us what “vegan” means on a label instead of deferring to our community. This is unethical if not illegal.
Unlike the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), which has various semi-autonomous grievances and appeals processes, the CFIA has no such things. To make matters worse, a large part of their budget is tied to the faith of the animal agriculture industry. This is not to say that without animal agriculture they would cease to exist, but they would be significantly smaller.
In the past, they have protected the private interests of the animal agriculture industry outside of the legal mandate of the agency. Unlike the CRA, it’s doubtful that they will have an epiphany and realize they have made errors and change their ways. This may have to be resolved in court. If this is an issue that would be of interest to you, please contact us.
There are some positive signs of note. Even though not much has changed since our update in 2023, we have witnessed more and more businesses choosing to label their product with free-from labels or “plant-based” instead of “vegan”.
We have also faced some ethical conundrums. We have banned large businesses, whose products are widespread, as helpful tools to prevent misleading labelling practices; however, more than once small businesses either failed or would have failed vegan certification but continued to label their product as “vegan”.
In these instances, we have remained silent, but we will be reconsidering this position in the future. On the one hand, it is clear that if we clearly stated to small businesses that if they fail certification and they continue to label their products as “vegan” we will automatically ban them publicly, it would mean losing an important opportunity to educate small businesses on the vegan standard and veganism in general. On the other hand, the current situation is untenable. While there are countless more products labelled as “vegan”, too many are not suitable for people that self-identify as vegan.
How to address this is unclear, there are various reasons behind this and we have already discussed many of them, but education clearly has a place and we are continuously reflecting on ways to best address these issues.
After countless efforts by many, our internal library of articles covers a wide range of subjects. We address most foundational issues and with the release of our ebook last year it is available in many formats. We will continue to update our library and ebook as needed, but it is now in a state that can allow us to focus some of our efforts on other things.
Times are uncertain, and it seems clear that things will get worse before they get better. A more compassionate world will likely have to wait for at least another year, but there’s no reason we cannot start small. More than one of you has contacted us to learn about vegan communities.
For various reasons, we have operated entirely with volunteers. Even if we had unlimited resources it is unclear whether we would suddenly hire countless people. However, one thing we were considering is offering free or subsidized housing to our volunteers instead of wages, thereby helping create a vegan community in the process. The location of our first office as the seed of the first vegan city might be a way forward.
These are some of the projects we have if resources permit.
This was once again a difficult year for animals, even human animals. Human animals have even seen their protection and rights diminished in various parts of the world and since we are selfish we know that when our exploitation increases it does not bode well for non-human animals.
As a secular philosophy, veganism is rooted in science. Science is clear that humans are animals. Once again this year we took some strong steps to make this clear, especially to those who already self-identify as vegan, that it is untenable to move exploitation around from one species of animal to another. We spend more time on non-human animals because they are under-represented in our society and not because they are more deserving to be free from exploitation.
As a charitable organization, we depend on the generosity of others for our existence. If there are things we should be doing but aren’t, please consider joining us to make it happen.
We want to again thank all our donors and volunteers for their generous support, and we invite everyone who shares in the vision of veganism to join us. The exact details of our 2025 projects will be dependent on the interests of our volunteers and supporters. We look forward to working with all of you.
