B.C.'s securities watchdog fined rule breakers $430M. Why can't it make them pay?

Ronald McHaffie said he had big plans to build a ski resort near Hope, 150 km east of Vancouver, ahead of the 2010 Olympics.

He cut an unlikely figure, with a Grizzly Adams beard and no history of resort development.

Yet the Bigfoot Ski Resort's website was full of promises world-class skiing, a golf course, a fishing lodge and an "antique train" carrying guests around the facility. The website, which now exists in archived form, purported to show endorsements from all three levels of government, and a range of permits.

McHaffie gathered $642,000 from dozens of investors, telling them construction was just "around the corner," according to a 2014 B.C. Securities Commission ruling.

But the provincial government had already rejected the project. The commission said McHaffie's claims “were all lies,” and he put the investors' money in his own account, blowing it on "personal expenses," including groceries and gas.

When the CBC tracked him down in 2013, he was living in a dilapidated mobile home in the B.C. Interior town of Princeton.

The commission fined McHaffie and ordered him to pay back the money in the 2014 ruling, but he died last year, leaving $2.64 million in debt to the commission, representing a $2 million penalty and the disgorgement of the investors' money.

His case, and the trail of frustrated investors it left behind, is far from unique. McHaffie is among more than 400 individuals and companies that the B.C. Securities Commission says owe about $430 million in unpaid administrative penalties and disgorgement orders.