I was just reading about a violation of the Canadian fisheries act that has a maximum penalty of $200k, and realized the absurdity of there ever being a maximum fine.
There should be no maximum fine on any corporate penalty given that we do not cap the size of corporations or their bank accounts.
It would be like having maximum jail terms of 25 years for immortal beings that can live to 10,000.
Okay, but then what purpose does a cap serve? The amount of harm doesn’t have a cap, why should the fine?
Caps make sense in some circumstances (like how a library’s overdue book fine caps at the price of replacing the book). I don’t know anything about the Canadian fisheries act and whether its cap is reasonable, but a reasonable cap (if there is one) generally shouldn’t have anything to do with the size of the corporation, unlike what OP proposes.
So this comment is just off-topic? The OP is about caps, and whether they are reasonable.
The OP is proposing that a fine (whether or not it is capped) should have some relation to the size of the corporation being fined, and I’m saying why that’s wrong.
No, the OP is proposing there shouldn’t be a cap. There’s no “whether or not it is capped” proposed, the OP just opposes caps.
The OP is proposing that there shouldn’t be a cap specifically because we don’t cap the size of corporations.
That doesn’t require that the size of the fine scales to the size of the corporation. The size of the fine could also scale to the size of the harm. A cap means that a company can inflict trillions of dollars of harm but only pay the fine up to the capped amount. That will usually lead to larger companies paying larger fines because they inflict larger harms, but not always.
But you just don’t want to engage with the topic of caps at all.