In addition to punitive penalties, both CEPA and the Fisheries Act make provisions for the Crown to recover any profits an offender may have derived from the illegal activity. Calculation of illegal profit can be a very complex issue. The following is a hypothetical example of one simple such calculation. It might be determined that, in order to save money a company had delayed design, construction, and commissioning of their treatment facility for a year. A recent trend in environmental enforcement favours a mechanism whereby any profit recovered from a company be directed to local programs or used to establish a trust fund or funds, in perpetuity for the creation of scholarships for environmental studies, support of local post secondary teaching institutions specializing in environmental, support of environmental education programs in schools, or some combination thereof.
Many companies are prominent players in the industrial community of their region.
In addition to the people directly employed by the company, many other local businesses rely on providing goods and services to the company and its employees. There is a pervasive belief held by Atlantic Canadians that large corporations are somehow given special treatment by environmental regulators. In order to secure an appropriate level of general deterrence and to reassure the public and corporations that compliance with environmental statutes is mandatory, courts have recently imposed obligations for offenders to pay for the publication, in a newspaper of general circulation in the area in which the offence took place, a full page article providing a full explanation of the facts relating to the commission of the offence. This provision was successfully used in R. v. Miramichi Pulp and Paper Ltd. in relation to a violation of the Storage of PCB Materials Regulations made under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. The text of the article should be either written by or approved by Environment Canada staff prior to publication.