Preface

• Pages: 11-13
• Author: Bryan Birtles

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Preface

My name is Bryan Birtles, and I am the son of Mark and Kathey

Birtles. I was born in Calgary, raised in Edmonton, and now I live

in Toronto. I am a settler, a Canadian of northern European ancestry.

e impetus for this book occurred while I was an articling stu-

dent. I articled at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto as

a clerk, where I was privileged to be involved in a case that consisted of

a novel claim for Aboriginal title to submerged land, as well as a claim

for treaty breach. Unusually, and luckily, I worked on the case for my

full term as a clerk; most articling students at the court are reassigned

halfway through the term in order to maximize their experiences. I was

also lucky to see the end of the case — which at least four other clerks

had worked on over the preceding years — with the decision finally

published on one of my last days at the court.

I did countless hours of research into treaties, especially into ful-

fillment and breach. e research covered much of Canada’s jurispru-

dence on the subject and touched on the United States’, Australia’s,

South Africa’s, and New Zealand’s approaches to treaties and Indigen-

ous law as well. At one point, perhaps frustrated by the diculty in

finding an answer to what seemed to be a straightforward question,

the judge I was working for lamented that there was no equivalent to

Chitty on Contracts or Wigmore on Evidence for Crown-Indigenous treat-

ies in Canada. She suggested that, with the amount of research I had