CALGARY – Testimony and legal arguments are being heard this week in Calgary Provincial Court in the sentencing of the Lake Louise Ski Area, after it pleaded guilty last year to destroying endangered whitebark pine trees in 2013.
The hearing began Monday (July 9) for Judge Heather Lamoureux to determine the punishment that should be handed to the company as a result of its guilty pleas to charges under the Species at Risk Act (SARA) and the Canadian National Parks Act.
According to Crown prosecutor Erin Eacott, the penalty under SARA carries a maximum of $300,000 per tree while the charge under the Parks Act for the removal of 150 trees on the company’s leasehold without a permit carries a maximum fine of $250,000 per tree.
“The Crown will be asking for a creative sentence and several things will go into it, but one thing it will include is a species restoration plan for whitebark pine,” said Eacott.
She said there are several important considerations to be made during sentencing, including how many trees were destroyed in total and how many were whitebark pine. Furthermore, Eacott told the judge there was a lack of oversight by ski area management leading up to the removal of the trees in August and September of that year.
“Managers of Lake Louise Ski Area were aware before the offence that whitebark pine was a species of concern and could not be harmed and evidence will show the work done on Ptarmigan Ridge was on the work plan for several months and there was a lack of oversight by Lake Louise Ski Area management,” said Eacott.
“Lake Louise Ski Area would not have received permits for the way the work was done."
The trees were removed from the Ptarmigan Ridge area, accessed from the top of the Grizzly Express Gondola. While Eacott told the judge a total of 150 trees were removed, experts testified as to how many of those could be considered whitebark pine, which was listed as endangered in 2012.
Peter Achuff, who co-authored the assessment and status report on whitebark pine for the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), spoke about the difference between the loss of an individual tree compared to the cumulative effect of the loss of trees overall.
Achuff said while the loss of whitebark pine trees on the ski hill's property might not seem significant when there are an estimated 200 million of the trees in Canada, if you consider all the threats facing the species, it does contribute toward their overall decline.
"Whitbark pine faces a death of 1,000 cuts," he said. "If it takes 1,000 cuts to kill you, each one individually doesn't seem like much, but the affect cumulatively is significant."
Found at high elevations, whitebark pine can include multiple stems growing from the earth, but all originate from a single tree. That makes estimating the number of trees destroyed by Lake Louise difficult, said Achuff.
Whitebark pine trees take 30 to 50 years before they are able to reproduce, and when they do have cones, it takes a Clark's Nutcracker, a species of bird, to open them and bury them in the ground.
Lake Louise has conducted an assessment of its leasehold for whitebark pine trees. However, as of press time, the ski hill's expert witnesses had not yet offered any testimony. The company is disputing the Crown's estimate that 38 whitebark pine trees were destroyed.
