Thomas Rodney Berger QC OC OBC (March 23, 1933 – April 28, 2021) was a Canadian politician and jurist.

[1] He was the son of Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant Theodor Berger and Nettie Elsie Perle, née McDonald.

[1] Described as a "young man in a hurry",[3] Berger challenged long-time BC CCF/NDP leader Robert Strachan for the party leadership in 1967.

Berger defeated another young MLA, Dave Barrett, to win the leadership convention and was widely expected to lead the NDP to its first general election victory.

[2] Berger was counsel to the Nisga'a in Calder v British Columbia (Attorney General), a case that inaugurated the concept of Aboriginal title in Canadian law.

[7][8] In 1981 when Canada was debating the merits of a diversity of provisions in the proposed Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Berger wrote an open letter to The Globe and Mail, asserting that the rights of Aboriginal Canadians and women needed to be included in any proposed charter.

He was invited by the Inuit Circumpolar Conference to lead the Alaska Native Review Commission (1983–1985) which culminated in the publication of Village Journey (1985).

[11][12] In 1995, Thomas Berger was appointed Special Counsel to the Attorney General of British Columbia to inquire into allegations of sexual abuse at the Jericho Hill School for the Deaf.

[20] In 2017, Berger was counsel to British Columbia in its challenge to Canada's approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline.

"[25] In September 1979, David Crombie, a liberal-minded reformer, as Minister of Health and Welfare under the Conservative government of Prime Minister Joe Clark, issued a statement representing "current Federal Government practice and policy in the field of Indian health."

[1] Edgar Z. Friedenberg, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1982, called Berger "perhaps the most effective and certainly the most respectable champion of the aboriginal peoples of Canada".

Swayze argues that "[t]he philosophy inherent in all thirteen" of the reports of British Columbia's Royal Commission on Family and Children's Law, on which Berger served as a commissioner, "is that legal sanctions should, in many cases, be a last resort, and to this end recommendations focused on the effective use of human rather than legislated solutions.