A 40-year-old North Shore woman who worked as education manager for the Tsleil-Waututh Nation has been placed under house arrest as part of an 18-month conditional sentence after pleading guilty to defrauding the First Nation out of more than $23,000.
Tonya Kristine Lewis was sentenced by Judge Joanne Challenger in North Vancouver provincial court after pleading guilty to seven counts of defrauding her former employer between November 2013 and April 2014.
Lewis stole the money, which was supposed to be used on programming for children and youth, to support a gambling addiction.
“She stole money which should have gone to support children and youth, and squandered those funds gambling,” wrote Challenger.
In considering her sentence, Challenger noted Lewis was a “trusted member of the management of the Nation. She was considered to be a personal friend to most of the staff. Instead, she was breaching their trust on a day-to-day basis.”
Lewis “was aware of and manipulated the financial safeguards in place for the management of the victim’s funds,” Challenger wrote.
To pull off her fraud, Lewis issued cheques to outsiders who then cashed them and gave Lewis the money. She told the people she recruited to help that she was doing that to “exhaust any surplus before the financial year-end,” according to the court decision. Those people weren’t aware that Lewis was using the cash for her own purposes, wrote Challenger.
When Lewis was first questioned about one of the cheques, she lied, but soon after confessed to taking the money and said she’d spent it on a gambling addiction. Lewis was immediately fired.
In a victim impact statement, a spokesperson for the Tsleil-Waututh Nation wrote that the band is “highly disheartened” by Lewis’s theft, which caused “substantial distress” for staff, who spent many hours investigating the fraud.
The Tsleil-Waututh continue to believe the amount taken by Lewis is substantially higher than the $23,200 reported to the RCMP.
In considering her sentence, Challenger noted Lewis is of Squamish and Nanaimo nation heritage and has lived most of her life on Squamish lands on the North Shore. Lewis had a troubled childhood and developed personality traits of being “manipulative, secretive and deceitful” as a coping mechanism to deal with past trauma, wrote Challenger. Lewis has no previous criminal record. But Challenger noted in 2004 Lewis was fired from a job with the Squamish Nation after being caught defrauding that First Nation of a similar amount. Criminal charges were not pursued in that case.
Challenger sentenced Lewis to an 18-month conditional sentence, beginning with a term of house arrest, along with 100 hours of community work service, followed by three years’ probation. Terms of probation include staying away from gambling facilities, taking counselling and being banned from any employment which would give her control over an employer’s money. The judge also ordered Lewis to work towards paying back the Tsleil-Waututh the money she took.
