Hunter charged for killing bear near Klukshu, Yukon, initially told hunt was legal, lawyer says

A Yukon hunter who killed a grizzly bear near Klukshu last year was initially told by authorities that the hunt was above-board, according to his lawyer — only for charges to be laid two weeks later, and then still later dropped.

Vincent Larochelle, who represented Scott Damsteegt in court, described the situation as "a little bit baffling" and suggested that public pressure may have played a role in the case.

According to court documents, Damsteegt killed the bear sometime around Nov. 8 last year. A conservation officer then swore a document alleging two territorial Wildlife Act violations — hunting a grizzly in an area where he was not permitted to and careless use of a firearm — on Nov. 21, 2023.

Damsteegt only had one scheduled court appearance in March of this year before the territorial Crown entered a stay on both charges in April.

In an interview Wednesday, Larochelle said he was still questioning why the charges were laid in the first place, explaining that Damsteegt, after the hunt, had called a conservation officer to the scene to confirm that the kill was legal.

"Conservation officers who attended the scene and looked at the footprints and looked at the area where the harvest occurred reached the same conclusion, that the harvest was legal," Larochelle said.

Larochelle claimed that the "only change in circumstances" in the two weeks between that and the charges being laid was that "people were unhappy" over the news that a bear had been killed in the Klukshu area.

"Are the two correlated? I can't say," he said, adding that he had no evidence that "public concern" — or anything else —  pressured officials into charging Damsteegt, but that the timing was "a little bit suspicious."

Yukon wildlife photographer Peter Mather previously told CBC News that he came across the carcass of the bear on Nov. 15, 2023, and while he posted about the situation on Instagram and Facebook, drawing hundreds of reactions and comments both condemning and defending bear hunting, he didn't do so until more than a week after charges were laid.

Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, whose settlement lands include Klukshu, did not respond to a request for comment about the situation, though elder Chuck Hume, who lives in the village during the summer and regularly stops in during the rest of the year, previously told CBC News that he believed there should be a two-kilometre no-shooting radius around the First Nation's communities.

The Yukon environment department did not directly answer a question about when conservation officers determined Damsteegt's hunt was legal.

"Yukon Conservation Officer Services worked collaboratively with [the justice department] on this matter," spokesperson Linea Volkering wrote in an email, "and the determination to stay the charges was made based on the results of the evidence and information collected during the investigation."