Читать книгу Canadian Business Contracts Handbook - Nishan Swais - Страница 20

We said that contracting requires something being actively pursued and not simply arising as a matter of coincidence, chance, or fate. Where the law is concerned, the fulfilment of that requirement begins with an offer. An offer is the starting point of every contract that the law will recognize as a contract.

To offer means to present something for rejection or acceptance. For example, if you call your sister offering to buy her piano, you’ve fulfilled the first requirement of a contract. You have presented something to her — in this case, an offer to buy her piano — which she can either accept or reject.

The varieties of offers you can make, and the form in which you can make them, are virtually limitless. You can offer to sell some of your wares and communicate that in an email. You can go door-to-door in your neighbourhood and verbally offer to clean homeowners’ chimneys. You can write out an offer to purchase someone’s farm and deliver it through an intermediary (e.g., a real estate broker). In each case, you have taken the first step toward forming a contract.

It is not important whether an offer is made verbally, in writing, or otherwise. As long as the person making the offer (offeror) communicates the offer to the person to whom the offer is being made (offeree), the offer is valid for the purposes of creating a contract.

An offer can be shouted across a crowded and noisy room (as happens on the floor of a stock exchange), written in an email, or presented in Braille. Needless to say, an offer can also simply be written on a piece of paper.

It’s worth noting, however, that not everything that looks like an offer is an offer. Consider the following examples: