Thoughts and Tributes on
the passing of Douglas Christie
One of Canada’s
Greatest Freedom Fighters
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Doug Christie
Memorial
Ernst Zündel presents the Golden Eagle
to Douglas Christie
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Priest Hails Free Speech Warrior Doug
Christie as a "Saint"
Priest Hails Free
Speech Warrior Doug Christie as a "Saint"
VICTORIA. March 15, 2013.
"Today we are laying a saint to rest," proclaimed Fr.
Lucien Larre, who said the funeral Mass this foggy morning
for Doug Christie, Canada's foremost free speech lawyer." He
fought for what was right," said Order of Canada winner and
psychologist Fr. Larre, "no matter the threats to his life
or the number of times his office windows were broken. He
stood tall."
Twice in three days, Canadians have
buried a taller than life man, known for his cowboy boots
and black hat. Folks crowded a Peterborough hockey arena,
March 13, to say farewell to Country and Western icon
Stompin' Tom Connors, the boy from Skinner's Cove, PEI, who
gave us songs like Sudbury Saturday Night, Bud the
Spud, My Stompin' Grounds, that celebrated Canada.
Today in Victoria, a Western Canadian who
struggled for more than 30 years to uphold another Canadian
value, freedom of speech, even for people vilified by the
press for their unpopular views, was buried. Doug Christie,
a proud Scotsman, would have smiled as a lean piper piped
his casket into a crowded St. Andrew's Cathedral in downtown
Victoria. A large bouquet of vivid red roses and Mr.
Christie's black Australian outback hat graced the top of
the casket.
Fr. Larre hailed Doug Christie as "a real
Westerner, a man with ideals and aspirations as high as the
Rockies. He stood for a better Canada, a freer Canada," the
priest told the packed cathedral made up of mourners who had
been Mr. Christie's family, friends, clients, neighbors,
and, in several cases, the beneficiaries of his kindness.
The Battling Barrister " had the ideals
our soldiers died for -- for freedom -- but we do not have
certain freedoms, like freedom of speech, in Canada today,"
said Fr. Larre, who returned his Order of Canada honor in
protest when the same honor was bestowed some years ago on
mass abortionist Henry Morgenthaler. "What mattered to Doug
Christie is a man's right to speak. He believed people have
the right to go to court whether they can afford it or not,"
he added.
In a stirring eulogy to his father,
Caderyn Christie, a second year law student, shared memories
of a complex man -- the battling lawyer so well known to the
public, the politician, the devoted father, the private man
with as wicked sense of fun and humor.
"A man like my dad was not meant to die
in a hospital bed but on a battlefield with a sword and
shield," he said. And Doug Christie very nearly did die in
the battle ground of the courtroom. For days during a three
week trial in Victoria, Mr. Christie had been in mounting
pain, fighting nausea and sleeplessness, but refusing
painkillers lest they dull his wits. Finally, on Thursday,
February 21, he was too ill to finish his summation and was
rushed to hospital and diagnosed with advanced terminal
liver cancer.
One of Doug Christie's heroes was
Confederate General Robert E. Lee whose portrait hung in his
office. Lee advised: "Do your duty in all things. You cannot
do more, you should never wish to do less."
Doug Christie took this to heart and was
driven by a sense of duty.
Caderyn revealed that Doug often recalled
growing up in Winnipeg and that there was always food on the
table but just enough. Doug paid his way through the
University of Winnipeg working on the railway and as a
lifeguard at Banff Hotsprings. For a while he lived in top
floor garret that was scorching in the summer and leaked
snow and rain in the frigid Winnipeg winter. Other part-time
work paid Doug's way through law school at the University of
British Columbia. Doug's single-minded goal was to practice
law.
He was part way through articling for a
Victoria firm when an accidental error in judgment angered a
prominent client and the law firm let Doug go. He was in
near despair seeing his career stymied before it even began,
his son recalled. Then, a single practitioner in Victoria
Barney Russ gave the Winnipeg law student a break and took
him on as an articling student. Nine months later, Doug was
called to the bar and began a 42-year career in law.
Years later, Doug Christie visited
Barney Russ who was dying of cancer. Doug asked what he
could ever do to thank or repay Mr. Russ for having given
him a chance. "Pass it on," he gasped with labored
breathing.
That had become a driving force in Doug's
life, his son recalled: "He chose to defend people who would
otherwise be unrepresented and he paid dearly in his
personal and professional life." Although he had struggled
hard to become a lawyer and succeeded, "he was very frugal
with himself."
Caderyn Christie said his father was
"profoundly kind to his children. He was also a proud
Scotsman and taught us kids how to pull the nails out of a
2' x 4" and reuse them." And, yet, Doug would treat a man
who was a regular panhandler at the church doors to a lunch
once a month. He didn't just toss him a loonie as he walked
by.
Caderyn concluded his eulogy with words
that left many an eye wet: "Robert Louis Stevenson said: 'A
leader is one who keeps his fears to himself and shows his
courage to others.' That was my father. He lived fully, he
lived freely and laughed every chance he got."
In his closing remarks, commenting on
Doug Christie's ever present cowboy boots, celebrant priest
Fr. Larre quoted a line from Country and Western singer
George Jones song Who's Going to Fill Those Shoes? "We must
get together for free speech and try to fill those shoes,"
he urged. —Paul Fromm
Leaders of
Canada's free speech movement at the reception at Doug
Christie's funeral in Victoria, BC., March 15, 2013: Dave "The
Unlicensed Man" Lindsay; Paul Fromm, Director Canadian
Association for Free Expression; expert witness on Inter...net
and computer technology, Bernard Klatt; and Marc Lemire,
webmaster of the Freedomsite, the only victim to win under
Canada's notorious Sec. 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act
(Internet censorship).
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“I think my
daughter said it best, that everybody talks about his legacy as a
lawyer, a public speaker, an inspirational speaker — a person who helped
a lot of people who were down and out and couldn’t pay — but she said
his real legacy was as a father,”
– Keltie Zubko
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“I was honored to
work with Doug Christie over the past 25 years. Canada is a much better
place today than it might have been because he had the courage to defend
clients targeted by the powerful and did so brilliantly. I regard him as
one of the greatest lawyers Canada has produced, since he defended
extremely unpopular and isolated people fearlessly and in doing so
protected the rights of all Canadians to freedom of speech and the right
to be heard. He is an advocate in the truest sense of the word.”
– Barbara Kulaszka
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“I’m saddened to
report that my friend Doug Christie has passed away. Doug was a lawyer,
husband and a dad from Victoria BC. But he was more than that of
course. For a generation he was Canada’s leading free speech advocate –
in fact, he was often Canada’s only free speech advocate. … Doug
Christie kept the flame of free speech burning for all of us. For Jews,
for gentiles, for blacks, for whites, for conservatives, for liberals…
That’s the thing about free speech that Doug Christie understood; it’s
the gift that you have to give to your opponents, if you want it for
yourself. I’ll miss Doug. He was a great public speaker, and a
passionate scholar of history … He’s gone, but his project [for freedom]
continues; and I pledge that I’ll continue his fight. Rest in Peace
Doug Christie; A freedom fighter of the first order.”
–
Ezra Levant
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“Doug was an
immensely brave man and a towering presence in Court. His height and
firmness of bearing made an impact on many a judge, and, I suspect, many
a miscreant or liar under cross-examination. Other lawyers have told me
that Doug was one of the most intimidating cross-examiners in this
Dominion. … The Doug I knew was a sensitive and proud man. He was a
deeply moral man. He did not seek notoriety. He felt the rejections and
condemnations deeply. Yet, Doug felt a higher imperative -- individual
freedom and liberty. These had once been the values of our generation. …
Doug Christie was a one man Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke
holding back the tidal wave of repression. His achievements were many.”
–
Paul Fromm
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“I weep and am
sorrowful. Doug Christie stood his ground, he fought using principle, he
is and always was a free man, he loved his life, his children, his
partner and all the treasure his life created. I saw him take on the
most difficult conundrums in our struggle to be free and defended the
principle of freedom for all of us. Objectively, we are measured by our
ability to improve the human condition and I am a better Canadian
because Doug Christie defended my freedom. This is a great loss to
humanity, to humans everywhere. I am proud to call Doug Christie my
countryman. You are a hero Doug Christie. We will not forget you. I will
not forget you. Thank-you Doug Christie.”
–
Philip Kuefler
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“Along with so many
others, I will remember Doug Christie with gratitude and high regard.
The memory of this courageous and principled man shines all the brighter
during our dark age of rampant opportunism and deceit. My sympathy goes
especially to Keltie, his devoted wife.”
–
Mark Weber
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“It was God who
sent Doug to me in a David and Goliath situation back in the 90s. If you
have never had an experience of being a client of his in a courtroom
full of hate, (for him and us) then you will never know the feeling of
the hand of God on your shoulders when the crown stays the charges and
the crowd gasps in disbelief wanting their pound of flesh. Doug rescued
us from the fire, for that, and all of his work there IS a special place
for him, in the arms of God.”
–
Joe Lockhart
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“When I met Doug
Christie he was the complete opposite of what I was told to expect. He
was a very caring libertarian; he stuck up for the rights of almost
anybody. … I’ve always kind of compared him to a giant sequoia. His
roots are deep; the shadow is right across the country. And we’ve lost a
giant. We really have.”
–
Barclay Johnson
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“Douglas Christie
is a hero and dedicated fighter for freedom of speech. In my youth, I
recollect attending a meeting where he was the guest speaker. I was
struck not only by his superior oratory skills, but even more so by both
his passion and love for freedom. He brilliantly conveyed the
significance of what freedom is all about and how vital it is to resist
artificially induced state control over it.
Over the past
couple of decades I have become closely acquainted with Doug. The
respect that spawned the evening I saw him speak for the first time only
deepened with every case and submission that he made on behalf of
freedom. His defenses consisted of a rare combination of sound logic and
reason combined with compelling emotion.”
–
Marc Lemire
Obituary
Born, Winnipeg, April 24, 1946, died
of metastatic liver cancer, Victoria, March 11, 2013.
Predeceased by his mother Norma in 2008. Survived by wife Keltie Zubko,
son Cadeyrn, daughter Kalonica, sisters Jane Christie and Myna Cryderman,
brother Neil, father Douglas, and the extended Zubko family.
Doug graduated with a double major in political science and philosophy
from the University of Winnipeg in 1967. He moved to Vancouver where he
graduated in law from UBC in 1970. He has lived in Victoria, B.C. since
1970, where he has maintained a sole proprietorship law practice in an
age of large legal corporations, occupying a humble office the size of
two parking spaces across from the courthouse. His practice initially
focused on criminal law, but he later developed a deeply passionate
interest in freedom of expression and civil liberties. Throughout his
life as a lawyer, he embodied the true spirit of “pro bono publico”
often representing clients of little means to ensure they had a voice.
He was a born defense lawyer, brilliant cross-examiner, and tenacious
arguer.
As Canada’s most prolific defender of free speech, he appeared in the
Supreme Court of Canada for this issue more times than any other counsel
in Canada, to date.
He defended the landmark cases of Keegstra, Zundel, Malcolm Ross, John
Ross Taylor, Canadian Liberty Net, and Finta, all before the Supreme
Court of Canada. Doug also appeared in the Old Bailey and the Court of
Appeal in London, England, and throughout Canada in all levels of court,
and his family spent much time seeing him off and greeting him at
airports.
His wife Keltie worked with him as his legal assistant during the years
before the children were born and together they worked on the case of
which Doug was proudest. As defense counsel in Canada’s only war crimes
trial (the Finta case), he took part in court proceedings for the
defense in Hungary, Israel and Canada. After a 2 year investigation,
millions of prosecution dollars and a 9 month trial, the accused was
acquitted without calling evidence, in less than 2 hours on the basis of
Doug’s cross examination. After the crown’s appeal to the Supreme Court,
he was successful in having the law severely restricted and it has never
been used again.
Up until the time of his death, he continued to advise clients around
the world on publication and free speech issues. Two and a half weeks
before he died, he was struggling to finish a jury trial, fighting pain
and nausea, but true to his aim, he still wanted to finish the trial to
the best of his ability. He deeply regretted to the end that he was
leaving his clients unrepresented by his illness and death.
During the 1990′s he built a reputation as a major inspirational speaker
for freedom, travelling the world speaking about its importance.
In 1978, he created a political movement called the Western Canada
Concept, for the Independence of Western Canada. As the major advocate
of Western Canadian independence, he spoke in 100′s of meetings in most
little towns and cities of Western Canada, on talk shows, to schools and
universities, and widely varied associations. For example, in July of
1981, he gave 36 speeches in 30 days, travelling throughout BC and
Alberta, advocating Western Canadian separation. He ran in many
provincial and federal elections, always taking the opportunity to
express his political opinions.
Cadeyrn and Kalonica will greatly miss his ever-present guidance,
encouragement, love and support as well as the spirited arguments he
delighted in starting around the table at meals. Keltie is profoundly
grateful for the great joy (amid the challenges) of life and work with
him for 32 years. He was a kind and humorous man who gave freely all
that he had of his wisdom, his fighting spirit, his off-the-wall
solutions and his love of beauty. In memory of Doug, and in lieu of
flowers, we ask simply that you do as he always tried to do: pass on any
kindness shown to you, to someone else.
— The
following piece written shortly before Doug's passing —
‘It’s the end of everything’
Defender of free speech fighting terminal
liver cancer
National Post - Joseph Brean
Douglas
H. Christie, the so-called Battling Barrister, counsel to almost every
prominent Canadian hatemonger of the last thirty years, from John Ross
Taylor to Ernst Zundel, has advanced liver cancer and is not expected to
live more than six months. He is not being treated, and has withdrawn
from the defense of Arthur Topham, a British Columbia man facing trial
on a rare charge of wilful promotion of hatred.
“If the doctors are right, it’s the end of everything,” Mr. Christie
said yesterday from his bed at home in Victoria, B.C.
The illness marks the close of a remarkable legal career that has seen
Mr. Christie stand up for freedom of speech, even in defense of the most
vile propaganda and often illegal racist incitement, everywhere from
human rights tribunals to the Supreme Court of Canada. As such, it
leaves a gaping hole in Canada’s legal scene.
“I don’t know anybody that’s willing to take these on with the type of
commitment I think is necessary, because it certainly is a costly
process, in time, in effort, and in reputation,” he said, and compared
himself to Father Damien, a sainted 19th century Belgian priest who
cared for people with leprosy in Hawaii.
You become associated with your clients and, as Father Damien found,
eventually you become a leper
“You become associated with your clients and, as Father Damien found,
eventually you become a leper,” he said.
Mr. Christie’s clients make up a rogues’ gallery of racism in Canada and
their cases mark the limits of Canada’s uniquely compromising approach
to the regulation of hate. They include John Ross Taylor, whose failed
defense by Mr. Christie at the Supreme Court in 1990 remains the
precedent on which hate speech cases are still argued, and Ernst Zündel,
the Holocaust denier whose case saw the criminal law against “false
news” struck down as unconstitutional.
As head of his Canadian Free Speech League, Mr. Christie also played an
important intervener role in the hate tribunal of FreedomSite webmaster
Marc Lemire, in which the internet hate-speech section of the Canadian
Human Rights Act was also judged to run afoul of the Charter right to
free speech.
His first big hate case was against Jim Keegstra, a teacher and former
mayor of Eckville, Alberta, who was charged in 1984 with promoting
hatred by spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to high school
students. The Alberta Court of Appeal overturned the conviction because
pursuing a defense of truth placed too high a burden on the accused, but
it was reinstated by the Supreme Court, in a 1990 analysis that remains
the legal benchmark.
“At that time, it was a novel proposition to prosecute people for what
they said,” Mr. Christie said. Criminal hate laws had been on the books
since the 1960s, but were effectively dormant, and Keegstra “was the
first case in which the state felt it was entitled to criminalize
persons on the basis of what they sincerely believed.”
Since then, Mr. Christie has been spoiled for choice. He represented
Michael Seifert, a Nazi SS guard whom Canada extradited to Italy in 2008
for gruesome concentration camp murders, and Imre Finta, acquitted in
1990 in Canada’s first war crimes prosecution.
He saw disgraced native leader David Ahenakew through to an acquittal
for his anti-Semitic comments, which was a cause of embarrassment for
the Saskatchewan Crown. “It’s quite a mixed bag when you charge a
visible minority person with a hate crime, because the only people who
are supposed to be haters are white people,” Mr. Christie said.
His most famous client of all was Zündel, a German who was barred from
arguing the “truth” of his holocaust denial theories as a defense
against a human rights complaint, and he later represented Zundel’s
reactionary protégé, Wolfgang Droege, whose Heritage Front brought
racial violence to the streets of Toronto.
The roster also includes some quirks, such as the Ontario gentleman who
does not believe the constitution permits the government to collect
taxes from him.
Perhaps inevitably, Mr. Christie has been accused of being a fellow
traveler with racists, and defending them because he shares their
beliefs. As such, he stands as an extreme case study in whether it is
fair to judge a lawyer by his clients.
In 1993, the Law Society of Ontario dropped misconduct charges over his
defense of Zündel and Finta, but the chair of its discipline panel
nevertheless issued a report saying Mr. Christie “made common cause with
a small, lunatic, anti-Semitic fringe element in our society.”
He also sued a B.C. broadcaster, Gary Bannerman, in 1990 for saying that
he has “aligned himself so many times with these perverted monsters that
he has to be viewed as one himself.” Mr. Christie lost on grounds of
fair comment, at both trial and appeal. Another libel suit was
successful, to the tune of $30,000 in 1984, against a journalist who
described Mr. Christie’s failed separatist political venture, the
Western Canada Concept, as an “Alberta version of the Ku Klux Klan.”
“Anybody who knows me knows that I treat all people fairly and I don’t
discriminate against individuals on the basis of any race, religion,
etc.,” Mr. Christie said in the interview. “But to the vast majority who
have only heard about me, they would definitely get that impression.”
In 2006, the Law Society of British Columbia found he committed
professional misconduct by counseling a client to prepare subpoenas on
his own, but the penalty was a modest fine and $20,000 in legal costs,
as he had acted out of “stress and excessive zeal to help his client,
rather than from desire for personal gain.”
Zeal has always been a mark of the Christie approach to hate defense.
He was literally the loudest person in the room on a fateful day in
Ottawa in 2008 when revelations about investigatory practices at the
Canadian Human Rights Commission blew the Section 13 hate speech debate
wide open, and set the stage for its eventual repeal. Forced to deal
with minor objections, Mr. Christie hollered that he had flown all the
way from Victoria and he was not going to abide the CHRC’s “obstruction”
of his cross-examination.
Otherwise, he has a soft and measured demeanor, eloquent to the point of
verbosity on legal issues, and known for rhetorical flourishes. But for
the trademark cowboy hat, he can seem almost professorial.
He pins much of the blame for Canada’s legal unease over hatred on
multiculturalism, which forced judges into awkward balancing acts at the
expense of fundamental values.
“I think it boils down to the fact that judges desire, in large measure,
to be seen as tolerant and relatively popular, and the opinions of
people like Mr. Zündel and Mr. Taylor are seen as intolerant and
unpopular,” he said. “Therefore it becomes a difficult matter for a
judge to hold in favor of someone who is publicly so perceived.”
Mr. Christie is married to Keltie Zubko and has two children, a son in
law school and a daughter in engineering.