The $40,000 fine that Richmond Provincial Court judge Patrick Chen handed Kai Kin Ng on May 15 is insufficient to deter those who poach endangered northern abalone, according to the fisheries officer who investigated the case.
"The fine might deter this individual, but it won't deter someone else because no one thinks that they're going to get caught," Department of Fisheries and Oceans officer and investigator Art Demsky told Business in Vancouver June 6.
Demsky and his team executed search warrants on Ng's residence and a storage facility and seized 48 boxes of abalone, weighing a total of 960 kilograms.
Most of the boxes contained legal species of abalone whereas 14 boxes contained some of the protected northern abalone that is illegal to possess.
"Of the 14 boxes, some were almost entirely northern abalone. In other boxes the northern abalone was mixed with other species," Demsky said. "The way to hide something that's illegal is to hide it with something that's legal. Then you hide with paper the stuff that's illegal."
The only substantial population of northern abalone is in B.C. waters.
In 2003, northern abalone were listed and protected as "threatened" under the Species At Risk Act, which aims to prevent endangered and threatened wildlife from becoming extinct.
Demsky said fisheries officers routinely find poachers who have abalone but only once a year or so find someone with a substantial amount of the endangered northern abalone and are able to take a case to court.
"The $40,000 is a fairly large fine for an individual. It would likely have been a lot higher had he not plead guilty," Demsky said.
