Ryan Dalziel was called to the bar when he was 22 years old and made partner at Bull Housser Tupper five years later. What makes Dalziel stand out from the many other young legal partners in Vancouver is that the 29-year-old has tried eight cases in front of the Supreme Court of Canada.
He was involved in the early stages of three of those cases, and some of them were initiated outside B.C. Very quickly he has become one of the most experienced Vancouver lawyers in Canada’s top court.
“I’m very privileged to have the chance to be involved in cases of not just local but national and public significance,” he said.
After Dalziel completed law school in 2003, he worked as a judicial law clerk to justices William Esson and Mary Newbury of the BC Court of Appeal. He went on to do the same job for Justice Rosalie Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Many of the cases he has been involved with have surrounded hot-button issues. He was the lead lawyer for B.C. in the Supreme Court of Canada case determining that the federal government could not be liable for health-care costs incurred as a result of a tobacco-related disease.
He also successfully argued at the Supreme Court of Canada that granting aboriginal commercial fishing licences was not racist, but rather that it was an example of affirmative action that is not contrary to the right to equality in the Canadian Constitution.
Sometimes he has acted against First Nations groups. For example, he successfully had the Supreme Court of Canada uphold Rio Tinto Alcan’s sale of $2 billion worth of power to BC Hydro despite opposition from an aboriginal tribal council.
“The nature of our role as advocates is to be able to represent both sides of any given problem,” he said.
Outside work, he sits on a legal advisory committee of the BC Civil Liberties Association. •
