Chapter 2: The Sounds of Silence
On July 8, 1997, the simmering family dispute crossed the line into open warfare.
A Statement of Claim was filed in the Alberta Court of King’s Bench, the siblings versus Donald Broder, over possession of the Broder Buck. The legal papers alleged it was an asset of their late father’s estate and demanded its return.
Donald wasted no time retaining counsel. His lawyer, Joseph Kueber of Bryan & Company, immediately spotted the flaw that would become the backbone of the defence: the plaintiffs had no legal standing to bring the action.
Why? Because almost thirty years earlier, in 1969 and 1970, each of Ed Broder’s children had already taken the belongings they wanted from their father’s estate. The Model T, firearms, tools, saddles, collectibles, all divided up informally and without any legal process. The house itself had gone to one of the brothers. No one had ever applied for probate. No Personal Representative had been appointed. In Canadian estate law, that is a fatal oversight.
Without a probate grant and a court-appointed estate administrator, none of the siblings had the legal authority to sue over what remained. In Kueber’s words, this was not simply a weak claim, it was a claim that could not exist in law.
The case lingered on the docket for years, but the calendar was quietly closing a trap.
By October 2000, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Elizabeth MacInnis of Weir Bowen, approached Donald with a request. She wanted his consent to close the pleadings in Court Action #9703-12949. Donald refused. To him, the absence of probate was not a minor technicality, it was the entire foundation of the case. Without it, the lawsuit had no legal legs to stand on.
Under Alberta’s Limitations of Actions Act, the two-year period to add or substitute proper parties, in this case a Personal Representative of the estate, expired on July 9, 1999. The clock had run out more than a year earlier.
On May 24, 2001, in a move that would later raise serious ethical questions, MacInnis applied for probate anyway. She secured the appointment of two of her own clients, plaintiffs already suing Donald personally, as the Personal Representatives of Ed Broder’s estate.
This maneuver placed her in an impossible legal position. She now represented, at the same time:
- The newly appointed Personal Representatives of the estate, and
- Plaintiffs suing Donald Broder in their personal capacities.
In estate law, that is a structural conflict of interest. Siblings cannot sue each other over estate property without probate in place from the outset. Once probate is granted, the Personal Representative is the only party with authority to sue on behalf of the estate, not individual heirs.
Donald’s position was ironclad. The pleadings had closed before probate was ever granted, the limitation period had expired years earlier, and the lawsuit had been fatally defective from the day it was filed.
What began as a family fight over a historic trophy had now crystallized into something else entirely, a procedural showdown where the rules of civil litigation were as decisive as any fact about who shot the deer in 1926.