Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Jack Knox: Victoria’s crackdown on dog triggers rants about tent city

The thing about the fuss over Cody the dog is that it isn’t really about the dog.
VKA-CODY-667.jpg
Charmaine Britton with her Cody, a docile ambassador at her Fort Street store for 13 years. Britton has been warned twice recently for having Cody unleashed on the sidewalk.

Jack Knox mugshot genericThe thing about the fuss over Cody the dog is that it isn’t really about the dog.

It’s about the anger of people who have come to believe there are two sets of rules in Victoria: one for the average shmucks who go to work, pay their taxes and don’t do drugs in public, and another for those who flout the law with impunity.

Not that Cody himself seems terribly troubled. Cody wouldn’t be troubled by Armageddon — let alone the encounter with the City of Victoria that set the Internet alight.

Cody is a Fort Street fixture, a docile, creaky, much-loved golden retriever who has filled the doorway of Charmaine’s Past and Present store for the past 13 years.

“He’s a working dog,” owner Charmaine Britton says. “He greets as many people as he can. He’s really the ambassador of the store.” That might make Cody sound more active than he actually is. Tuesday, fawned over by a steady stream of admirers, he exhibited all the size, energy and movement of a large bag of potting soil. We’re not exactly talking about some bare-fanged, snarling Cujo-Trump cross here.

Last Wednesday, Cody was basking in the sun just outside the store’s front door when an animal control officer came along and — for the second time in two or three weeks — issued Britton a warning for having the dog unleashed on the sidewalk. Could have written her a $100 ticket. Didn’t.

Britton took no issue with the officer’s actions. “He was polite and professional. He was just doing his job,” she said. “We are the ones at fault. Cody was on the sidewalk without a leash.” She promised to keep the dog inside.

That’s the way things stood until Monday, when someone on social media posted — inaccurately — that the store had been fined.

It doesn’t take much to set Facebook on fire at the best of times, but this one quickly reached Fort McMurray proportions. Britton came to work Tuesday to find hellfire raining down on her behalf, unsolicited.

Victorians were incensed, contrasting Britton’s treatment with what is seen as unchecked lawlessness downtown. Posters wanted to know why the city was cracking down on sleeping dogs while tolerating open drug use, aggressive panhandling, assaults…

“There are literally thousands of comments on these different websites,” Britton marvelled. “Probably half of the people mention tent city.”

Right, tent city. It’s the source of a lot of anger right now, the perception being that government has failed completely, unable or unwilling to come to grips with a dystopian nightmare on the courthouse lawn.

With that in mind, Coun. Charlayne Thornton-Joe says she understands those who are upset by the Cody story.

“I can understand, because it stems from frustration.”

But she also says people can’t simply ignore laws they don’t like — illegal parking, riding without a helmet, skateboarding on the sidewalk, whatever — because of what’s happening around tent city. Those laws exist for a reason, including the one about unleashed dogs on the sidewalk, a rule that is there to protect people in wheelchairs, or who are visually impaired.

She also says council can’t simply shut the camp down, not when there’s nowhere else for the tent city inhabitants to go. The judge who ruled on the matter made that clear.

As for people who are upset about the camp getting washrooms and running water, well, aren’t they the same ones who are upset about public urination?

And she worries about the charged language she’s hearing, as well as the broad-stroke condemnation of the camp’s inhabitants. “I’m not saying issues don’t exist, but painting everyone at tent city with one brush is not correct.”

Thornton-Joe says all this knowing she won’t get much sympathy, not when the fight is between City Hall on one side and an aging golden retriever on the other. (“My family are going to hate me,” she says.) Really, the rest of city council should buy her a beer for stepping up and taking one for the team.

As for Britton, she appreciates all the support, including that from the Winnipeg businessman who called late Tuesday to say A) he takes his old dog to work every day and B) he’ll pay any fines she gets. She also vows to keep Cody inside the store with the door closed. “Hopefully, he’ll get used to it.”