Whitehorse mobile-home park operator Lobird Living Corp. was fined $8,500, plus a $1,275 surcharge, after pleading guilty to five water-licence offences involving missing monitoring data, reports and a spill contingency plan.
Judge Christie imposed the sentence on May 20, 2026, in R. v. Lobird Living Corp., 2026 YKTC 25. The company had entered its guilty pleas on April 1 under section 38(3)(a) of Yukon's Waters Act.
The Territorial Court of Yukon found no evidence of environmental damage or harm to anyone. It also accepted that the company had brought itself into compliance. But repeated missed opportunities to meet its obligations made the past breaches serious enough to warrant the Crown's requested fines.
Missing information after repeated warnings
According to the agreed facts, Lobird Trailer Park served approximately 200 residents using groundwater wells and its own drinking-water and wastewater treatment systems, rather than Whitehorse's municipal water and sewer infrastructure.
The water licence required a current spill contingency plan, water sampling and reporting, and annual measurements of sludge in the sewage lagoon. Those monitoring requirements followed concerns raised during the licensing process about incomplete information on local groundwater conditions and the movement of waste from the lagoons.
A July 2024 inspection identified deficiencies. The company missed an extended August 30 deadline for corrective action and another deadline in March 2025. Inspectors continued communicating with the company about compliance before charges were laid in August 2025.
The judge found the company's culpability fell in the middle to upper part of the range. Monitoring and reporting requirements went unmet for 167 days, sludge results were missing from two annual reports, and the spill plan remained unfinished for more than 15 months.
Later compliance reduced, but did not erase, the penalty
The defence proposed total fines of $3,000, describing company representatives as overwhelmed and inexperienced. It pointed to a completed spill plan, staff upgrading, improved reporting and an environmental consulting agreement as evidence of corrective work.
Christie treated the guilty pleas, admission of responsibility, remorse, lack of previous convictions and absence of proven harm as mitigating factors. However, the company had saved money while failing to comply. The judge referred to consulting arrangements showing compliance costs of up to $25,000 over roughly eight months, rather than fixing that figure as an exact amount saved.
Applying environmental sentencing principles that emphasize deterrence and denunciation, the judge imposed:
- $1,500 for failing to submit a current spill contingency plan;
- $2,500 for failing to collect required monitoring data;
- $2,500 for failing to report monitoring data; and
- $1,000 for each of the missing sludge-measurement reports for 2023 and 2024.
Surcharge applied despite no identified victim
The defence also sought to have the surcharge waived or reduced, arguing that the regulatory offences involved risk rather than an identified victim. The Crown sought a 15 per cent surcharge under Yukon's Crime Prevention and Victim Services Trust Act.
The judge rejected the defence's reliance on the trust's crime-prevention and victim-services purposes. Those provisions governed how the money would be used; the trust also received money from sources other than fine surcharges. Christie imposed the requested $1,275 surcharge, bringing the combined amount to $9,775.
The company was given one year to pay both the fines and the surcharge. The court dismissed the two remaining counts on the replacement charging document, along with the original charging document in its entirety.
