Alberta lawyer was drawn to the practice area's merging of history and law
Years ago, as an associate at Fraser Milner Casgrain, Richard Jones was working on his umpteenth whiplash case one day when a partner dropped a stack of files on his desk. The client was the Western Irrigation District, and the case marked a distinct departure from the insurance litigation matters that Jones had been cutting his teeth on at that first job. But Jones was immediately hooked: it was his introduction to water law.
Before he studied law at the University of Calgary, Jones majored in history. What fascinated Jones about that first water case was its position at the intersection of both disciplines.
The case required him to “learn the historical context of how this irrigation district came about and how these irrigation works are constructed,” he says. That involved reviewing the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway, to which the Canadian government had granted large tracts of land in the 19th century to build a railroad. To “get some value back for these large tracts of land,” Jones says, the CPR pursued large irrigation projects in Alberta – including what would become the Western Irrigation District. “We’re still dealing with the legacy of that," he says.
Nowadays, Jones is one of only a handful of lawyers in Canada with expertise in water law. As counsel at Brownlee LLP, his clients include municipalities and water commissions, and his practice spans corporate, commercial, and environmental matters. These include cases involving water conveyance, water allocation, contaminated site remediation, Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act offences, and more.
After nearly a decade at Fraser Milner Casgrain, Jones left to establish a boutique firm, Vipond Jones LLP, with another associate. He ran for Alberta’s conservative Wildrose party in Alberta’s 2012 provincial election – losing by about 500 votes, he says – before joining McMillan LLP, where he would stay for about another decade. In 2022, he joined Brownlee after a friend at the firm approached him, sharing that several clients needed water expertise.
Over the course of his career, Jones’ reputation as a water expert grew. Individuals began approaching him for help with securing water licenses, and later, municipalities began to seek him out too. Because southern Alberta is what Jones calls a “water poor” region – that is, subject to drought and unpredictable precipitation – there’s a need for water storage; Jones learned what types of approvals and what type of land was needed for water storage in the province. He eventually began working with the environmental division of the Ministry of Justice of Alberta, which would consult him on water issues throughout the province.
Jones’ accomplishments include several precedent-setting court decisions. In a case called Erik v. McDonald, for example, which the Alberta Court of Appeal decided in 2019, Jones “was able to establish that water rights – these riparian rights – included a right to recreational use, so to canoe or kayak on the top of the water, which is separate and distinct from the right to navigate on a navigable river,” he says.
That case – which concerned a dispute about a fence that had been erected in a reservoir – was what “some people would describe as a fight between neighbours,” Jones says. What he saw, however, was “a determination as to what is the full extent of riparian rights with respect to a lake.”
Another recent case, Harwood Farms Ltd. v Western Irrigation District, concerned the right to spill water from a canal into a natural watercourse and the interpretation of a CPR easement dating to the early 20th century. The Court of King's Bench agreed with Jones that it was necessary to look at the factual circumstances of when the easement was entered.
Jones and his colleagues presented “this historic evidence as to what the topography would have been like – where the natural watercourse would have been – so that we could establish the right to spill the water onto this adjoining land owned by a farmer,” he says. One of the deciding factors in that case also involved Alberta case law dating back to 1923, Jones says, recalling that the judge described the case as a “fascinating case about the history of the CPR and Alberta.”
Recently, Jones has also been involved in projects by the Canada Infrastructure Bank to modernize infrastructure in Alberta’s irrigation districts. Jones represented the Western Irrigation District to ensure that the repayment terms to the bank were fair and appropriate – the biggest transaction the district had ever entered in relation to modernization efforts. He is also involved in advising on a governance structure for a potential new irrigation project in the Municipal District of Acadia.
Even with all this work, though, Jones’ fascination with water law seems bottomless. Whenever he goes into a second-hand bookstore, he says, he must look for books on water, estimating he probably has more books on water law than most libraries.
“Basically, I’m like a huge water geek,” he laughs.
