dc6bc5d2   
   XPost: can.general, soc.culture.canada, alt.politics   
   XPost: can.politics   
   From: brianlambsbigtoe@yahoo.ca   
      
   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.   
      
      
   Related   
   ‘It’s the end of everything’: Defender of hatemongers, free speech   
   fighting terminal liver cancer   
   Human rights tribunal scores victory over neo-Nazi   
   .   
   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.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)