Doug Christie: Defender of free speech or sympathizer of hate-mongering clients?

In death Doug Christie remains an enigma to me.

To his supporters the controversial Victoria lawyer, who died of liver cancer Monday at age 66, was a defender of free speech, even though his most prominent clients all seemed to be aging Nazis, anti-Semites and hate-mongers.

His detractors believed Christie shared his clients' beliefs, though he was always careful not to embrace them publicly. The Law Society of Upper Canada, remarking on his performance during his successful defence of alleged Nazi war criminal Imre Finta, admonished Christie for comments that "crossed the fine line separating counsel from client."

Christie's views on free speech put him in the libertarian camp. He saw the Criminal Code provisions against hate promotion as unnecessary infringements of personal freedom and spent a career defending that view. He cultivated a righteous gunslinger image right down to the black cowboy hat that he was never without, except in court.

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I had a chance to watch Christie at close quarters for months when I covered the first trial of James Keegstra for The Canadian Press in the mid-1980s. The onetime high school teacher in the small central-Alberta town of Eckville was charged with wilfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group, the Jews, in his history class.

Christie's bullish courtroom style frustrated the Crown prosecutor and tested the patience of the judge. He kept his client on the stand for more than three weeks to minutely detail his theory that a world Jewish conspiracy controlled every aspect of society.

The marathon was intended to show Keegstra honestly held the beliefs he forced on his students, which could be a defence against the charges. But observers thought it was overkill, giving Keegstra a platform to spout hatred.

The jury found Keegstra guilty after three days of deliberation. Christie got the conviction overturned on appeal but a second trial produced the same verdict.

The case earned Christie a steady stream of clients from the murky fringe, including Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel, anti-Semite David Ahenakew, Aryan Nations leaders Terry Long and John Ross Taylor, and old Nazis like Imre Finta and Michael Seifert.

Christie never got rich representing these people. He reportedly took many cases pro bono or at reduced fees. He kept representing them even though he most often found himself on the losing end.

Christie, who once headed the separatist Western Canada Concept party, was disillusioned with Canada and yearned for the West to break away. It was another of his lost causes and it grew from the same impulse that drove him to defend the Keegstras and Zundels of the world.

"I know defending Dr. Ahenakew, Mr. Keegstra, Mr. Zundel and others has made me a target for my enemies," Christie wrote in a 2005 article posted on his web site. "It is a lever to trick people into condemning me.

"But I reasoned that if I did not have the courage to defend the unpopular, free speech would die and Western Canada would be as corrupt and shallow as Canada has become."

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Christie saw himself as the guy who stood between the schoolyard bully and the object of their torment. It was the West against Ottawa, the holders of unsavoury views against the justice system.

"I can't stand to see an individual attacked by overwhelming power when all they have done is express their opinions, or be themselves," Christie wrote. "I will always defend such people."

The article revealed Christie's sense of his own martyrdom.

"I concede I have often failed, but have you any idea how much worse for freedom it would have been, if I had not fought?"