Chapter 6: Money
On paper, Donald and Craig had already won.
Procedurally, the plaintiffs had barred themselves from the courthouse door by failing to secure probate before filing suit. The limitation period had passed. The pleadings had closed. The law was on the defendants’ side in every measurable way.
Yet the fight did not end.
The case lumbered on, absorbing years of time and tens of thousands in legal costs. Motions, applications, and procedural twists piled up, but none of it changed the fundamental truth: the plaintiffs had no standing from the outset.
This persistence raised darker questions, ones that went beyond the fate of the Broder Buck.
Why was the court allowing a claim that should never have made it past the filing counter?
Why were obvious conflicts of interest ignored?
Why did procedural rules that bind ordinary litigants seem to bend when certain lawyers and judges were involved?
To Donald and Craig, it began to look like the fight was no longer about a set of antlers at all. The Broder Buck had become a pretext, a vehicle for something else. An arena where influence, reputation, and power inside Alberta’s justice system could be tested.
It was, in their view, a world of white collar criminals in robes and suits, where professional courtesy masked misconduct and accountability was a mirage. The further they dug, the more the courtroom resembled a hunting ground of its own, except here the quarry was not a record-breaking deer, but the truth about how the system worked and who it really served.