A man convicted of eight federal fisheries charges for offences throughout the province has been sentenced to six months in jail.
Scott Stanley Matthew Steer, 36, appeared in a Nanaimo courtroom on Tuesday to be sentenced for eight charges under the federal Fisheries Act. The locations of his offences centred on Vancouver Island, with charges that originated in Nanaimo, Ucluelet, Gold River and Port Hardy. Steer was also convicted of attempting to deal fish without a licence in Dawson Creek.
He was found guilty of two counts of selling fish without a licence, two counts of failing to maintain the monitoring system of a vessel under his charge and three counts of landing groundfish (halibut and sablefish) without validation.
He had previously pleaded guilty to failing to maintain harvest logs.
Steer had been employed as fishing master of Pacific Titan, a 50-foot vessel authorized to harvest tuna in American waters and sablefish in Canada.
The court found that Steer had used the vessel to illegally harvest fish “under cover of darkness and without validation,” which he later sold under the alias John Renton.
The Crown had sought a summary conviction and a fine of $250,000 paired with 10 months in prison.
“It is not possible to estimate with any accuracy what weight or value of fish were landed by Mr. Steer without validation,” Justice Ted Gouge wrote in his reasons for judgment.
Gouge concluded that three catches landed without validation each weighed “thousands of pounds.”
“It is clear that the three occasions … were not the only occasions when Mr. Steer committed this crime,” he wrote.
Steer was given a six-month jail sentence for each charge, to be served concurrently. He was ordered to pay $15,000 in restitution for the lost wages of a crew member. Steer was given a 10-year fishing prohibition.
Gouge opted not to impose a fine as Steer would likely struggle to pay and his family might suffer as a result. Despite this, he wrote that “a fine of less than $100,000 would be entirely inadequate” as a deterrence for the crimes.
“Mr. Steer’s skills and experience would enable him to make a valuable contribution to society if he could be trusted to fish in compliance,” Gouge wrote.
