A B.C. Supreme Court justice has declined to increase a $140,000 fine levied on the owner of the NHL’s Dallas Stars for destroying fish habitat at Kamloops Lake.
Calling the penalty a “pittance” for Tom Galgardi — whose assets include the Stars, Kamloops Blazers and the Sandman hotel chain — the Crown appealed the sentence given by provincial court judge Stephen Harrison in December of last year. It asked the B.C. Supreme Court to more than double the fine, to $300,000.
Gaglardi was convicted last fall on two counts of harmful alteration of a fish habitat. His company, Northland Properties, was found guilty of identical counts, while his father, Robert Gaglardi, was acquitted.
Justice Susan Griffin said the provincial court judge did not make an error in his penalty. Gaglardi was also required to pay $85,000 in a bid to restore damage at his Kamloops Lake waterfront property.
“The Crown is correct in its position that when a crime is committed by a sophisticated person for purely selfish reasons, the moral blameworthiness of the crime is great. The respondents’ moral culpability is at the high end of the scale here,” Griffin wrote, adding “damage to the environment caused by the respondents was significant.”
But, Griffin added, a review of case law shows the penalty to be appropriate under the law.
“I may have imposed a higher fine in the circumstances, but that is not the test . . . It is clear that the sentencing judge considered all relevant factors and I am not able to find that the total penalties imposed, when remediation costs are taken into account, were disproportionately low as to be unfit.”
During the trial last year, court heard the Gaglardi family home on Kamloops Lake in Savona — known as Tom’s Shack — was undergoing extensive renovations in 2010.
The charges stem from riprap installed by workers taking orders from Gaglardi during construction of a boat ramp and shoreline trees he ordered removed from the property.
Gaglardi apologized for the damage during a sentence hearing.
An expert in the trial testified the work turned the property “from a very good fish habitat to a moonscape.”
A former Northland employee testified during trial he was ordered to destroy documents and throw his computer hard drive in the lake when federal investigators began looking into alleged environmental improprieties.
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