Chapter 5: Old Man
By the spring of 2004, the case had already dragged on for seven years. Donald Broder was seventy-five years old, frail, and confined to a wheelchair. He had no criminal record, no history of violence, and no reason to believe he would ever see the inside of a jail cell.
That changed on April 23, 2004, when Justice Myra Bielby of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench ordered Donald into custody. The charge? None. He was not a convicted man. Yet the justice system saw fit to place him in the Edmonton Remand Centre, a maximum-security facility designed for accused criminals awaiting trial.
For eleven days, Donald endured what the family would later call “unspeakable behavior and treatment of an elderly, unwell man.” Sometimes he was placed in isolation. Medical care was sporadic. Food came late, and when it came, it was hardly food at all—cold pancakes, cold potatoes. It was the kind of neglect that would be inexcusable for any detainee, let alone a senior citizen in poor health.
The family could not reconcile the reality before them with the country they thought they knew. In their open letter, they wrote with bitter irony:
“We understood that the Government of Canada had Donald H. Broder incarcerated so they could take good care of him. Surely, the Alberta Justice Department would only incarcerate an innocent 75-year-old senior citizen because the Governments of Canada treat prisoners better than the elderly?”
Six days after his release, on April 29, 2004, Donald was ordered back into custody. The stated reason was almost unbelievable. Justice Bielby had seen him in a wheelchair and determined that he needed someone to push it so he could attend court. The solution, apparently, was to have him remanded again so that “one of Edmonton’s finest” could wheel him in and out of the courtroom.
For the Broder family, it was a moment that cut deeper than any legal loss. This was no longer about procedural rules or property rights—it was about dignity, humanity, and the shocking ease with which both could be stripped away.
“To treat a senior citizen in such a cruel and inhumane manner,” the family wrote, “is a direct violation of the values Canadians hold dear. This is not how we treat our elders—individuals who have contributed to society, raised families, and paid their taxes with the reasonable expectation that, in their final years, they would be treated with care, respect, and dignity.”
The expectation was shattered. The open letter called on then-Premier Alison Redford to apologize, refund damages, and commit to legislation protecting vulnerable seniors from similar treatment. The demand remains unanswered to this day.
For Donald, the experience was more than an indignity—it was a warning. If the system could do this to him, an elderly man in a wheelchair, it could happen to anyone.
What had begun as a dispute over a deer rack was now something larger. The fight had moved beyond the walls of the courthouse, into the realm of human rights, government accountability, and the uncomfortable question of what “justice” in Alberta really meant.