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Controversial free speech defender Douglas H. Christie, lawyer for
Canada’s most prominent hatemongers, dead at 66

He was known as the ‘Battling Barrister,’ a staunch defender of free
speech who represented Canada’s most prominent hatemongers from human
rights tribunals to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Quietly, in a hospice bed surrounded by family, Douglas H. Christie
died Monday. Nearly two years after being diagnosed with prostate
cancer, the Victoria, B.C. based lawyer died of advanced liver cancer
and was not expected to live six months. He was 66.

Mr. Christie’s illness forced him to withdraw from the defense of
Arthur Topham, a British Columbia man facing trial on a rare charge of
willful promotion of hatred online, and he was not seeking medical
treatment for his cancer.


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He was perhaps best known for defending Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel,
and John Ross Taylor, a Canadian fascist political activist and white
power leader.

“I am heart-broken to say that Doug passed away this afternoon in
Victoria Hospice,” his wife Keltie Zubko wrote in a statement. His
family was with him and were “able to say all that was in our hearts
to say before he let go of the pain and suffering to leave us with the
immense gifts of his love for us and the lessons of his life.”

Mr. Christie’s death leaves an extraordinary legacy of defending free
speech, even if it included hateful propaganda and illegal racist
incitement. It also leaves a hole.

“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,” Mr. Christie told the
Post‘s Joseph Brean in an interview last month in which he 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.”

“I was honoured to work with Doug Christie over the past 25 years,”
wrote Canadian human rights lawyer Barbara Kulaszka in an email to the
Post for the interview it ran with Mr. Christie in the weeks before
his death.  “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.”

“Doug’s towering presence in the defence of freedom will be sorely
missed,” said Paul Fromm, director of the Canadian Association for
Free Expression, self-proclaimed Nazi-sympathizer and former client of
Mr. Christie’s.

As head of his Canadian Free Speech League, Mr. Christie was a primary
intervenor 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.

On his blog, Mr. Lemire wrote “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.”

Mr. Christie also 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 first appeared on the national radar in 1983
when he took on the case of James Keegstra, a school teacher fired
from his job and criminally charged with promoting hatred by teaching
school children that there was a Jewish conspiracy. This case caught
Zundel’s attention.

Mr. Christie was born in Winnipeg and graduated from the University of
British Columbia law school in 1970. He leaves his wife, and two adult
children Cadeyrn and Kalonica.