Pets, Professors, and Politicians: The Founding and Early Years of the Atlantic Veterinary College (review)

A whale washes up on a Vancouver beach, bovine tuberculosis reappears on a farm near Manitoba's Riding Mountain National Park, pit bulls are banned in Ontario, and rabies reappears in Newfoundland – four recent reminders of how animals and humans are inextricably interwoven culturally, economically, and politically. Mediating, promoting, defending, repairing, and sometimes rending this fabric are 8000 or so Canadian veterinarians. Less visible in news columns than whales, cattle, dogs, or moose, veterinarians and their work permeate Canadian society, politics, and culture. When human, animal, or ecosystem health is at stake, veterinarians are near at hand – or should be. (For current debate on the social roles of Canadian veterinarians see P. Eyre, N.O. Nielsen, and J.E.C. Bellamy, Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 225 (2004): 40–1.)

One aspect of this complex and pervasive profession is portrayed in Marian Bruce's fine history of the Atlantic Veterinary College, Canada's most recently established veterinary school. The story begins in the 1970s, when concerns over a shortfall in the number of veterinarians induced Agriculture Canada to organize a manpower study. Concluding that the three existing veterinary schools – Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph, Faculté de médecine vétérinaire at St-Hyacinthe, and the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon – could not expand enough to meet anticipated shortfalls, the study advocated the foundation of a fourth. Maritime veterinarians soon began lobbying for its placement there.

At the same time the four Atlantic provinces began complicated negotiations among themselves about which would land the future veterinary college and which existing educational institution would host it. This part of the story, briskly and clearly told, reveals much about higher education in, and the political and economic dynamics of, 1970s Atlantic Canada.

In a deft political move Charlottetown brought the 'quiet, intense, and extraordinarily well-focused' Reg Thomson to Prince Edward Island from the Ontario Veterinary College. On leave from the OVC, Thomson 'was to persuade Atlantic Canadians of the need for, and benefits of, a veterinary school in the region and to come up with a vision of the kind of school it should be' (46–7). His task was to convince politicians, veterinarians, educators, and the citizenry not only that Canada's fourth school should be established but that it should be settled on PEI, a small, rural province with an underdeveloped educational infrastructure. After three years of hard work, a discouraged Thomson gave up and took a professorship at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine.

Thomson's retreat to Saskatoon in 1981 either spurred on – or left a vacuum for – Maritime and Ottawa politicians to work out an agreement in 1983, locating the new veterinary school at the University of the Prince Edward Island and dividing the costs among the four provinces. Agriculture Minister Eugene Whelan, a key supporter of PEI interests in Ottawa, was at the centre of the deal, contributing $500,000 from the federal treasury. This dramatic, enlightening, and often colourful story – for example, confusion over the respective meanings of aquamarine and aquaculture – is well told by Ms Bruce.

A five-way agreement having been reached, Reg Thomson was recalled to Charlottetown to establish and organize the college. In three years this masterful academic entrepreneur readied the college for its first class, which arrived in 1986. The University of Prince Edward Island then graduated the Atlantic Veterinary College's first DVMs in 1990.

In this book and elsewhere there is a presumption that the veterinary profession's base is in agriculture, and in AVC's case in aquaculture as well. The new college, after all, was located in a famously rural province, the federal minister of agriculture – long involved in the college's gestation – brought to the table critical funds at a critical time, and early estimates projected AVC's potential impact on Maritime agriculture and aquaculture...