598 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 4 JULY 2021
The Honourable Judge Darin T. Reeves
Darin T. Reeves was appointed to the Provincial
Court of British Columbia in Fort St. John effective
February 1, 2021. A native of Victoria, and the son of
a newspaper pressman and full-time mom and office
assistant, Darin has spent much of his life in service
to Canada. A member of the Royal Canadian Air
Cadets growing up, he learned to fly gliders and light
aircraft while still in high school, and upon graduating he joined the
Reserve Force as a cadet instructor in order to pass these skills on to others.
After working for two years as everything from a dish washer, cook and bartender
to a truck driver to pay his way through a business diploma at the
Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, Darin briefly tried his hand at being
an accountant. Quickly realizing that accounting requires an inordinate love
of both numbers and time spent alone, he transferred from the Reserve into
the Regular Force as a maritime surface officer in the Royal Canadian Navy.
Darin spent the next ten years sailing the world in four different warships
of Canada’s Atlantic and Pacific fleets. His first ship was the steam-powered
HMCS Terra Nova, which had been built in the 1950s and was accordingly
small, cramped and still reliant on antiquated technology such as vacuum
tubes, spares for which could only, by that time, be acquired from the ex-
Warsaw Pact states of Eastern Europe. Darin’s next three ships were all
newly built in the 1990s and were thus more modern and somewhat more
comfortable, but this also meant longer trips and more time away from his
wife and growing family.
Specializing in the art and science of anti-submarine warfare, Darin was
also the boarding officer in two of his ships, which saw him leading teams
of sailors to board, search and, if required, seize other ships. It was in this
capacity that he led his team in what was likely the Navy’s first counterpiracy
operation in the modern age: the rescue of the sailing vessel Longo
Barda from hijackers off the coast of Somalia in 1995.
For his next project, Darin completed a bachelor of commerce degree at
Royal Royals University while still serving full-time as a naval officer, and
immediately followed this up with law school at the University of Victoria.
Upon being called to the B.C. bar, he transferred from the Navy to the Office
of the Judge Advocate General, and was immediately posted to Halifax,
Nova Scotia for his first assignment as a legal officer.