Christie Appealing Professional Misconduct Ruling?

On May 10, we posted an article concerning Doug Christie losing his appeal of the Professional Misconduct Ruling that had originally been brought against him by the Law Society of BC (the actual hearing decision can be found here). In a subsequent post, we received a note from a friend intimating that Christie might appeal to the Supreme Court:

Word is that the Lawyer for the Damned is going to take this to the Supreme Court of Canada on the grounds that Societies that regulate the standards of conduct and honesty for lawyers are unconstitutional.

Money's no object.

It turns out that the message sent to us was actually a joke, however, it turns out that the joke might not have been far off from the truth. In his May newsletter to supporters, Christie intimates that he's considering taking the Law Society to the Court of Appeal:




This is the interesting part:

The Law Society has made clear that if Mr. Christie does not appeal to the Court of Appeal, they will not claim the $8,000 to $10,000 for the review by the Benchers.

Mr. Christie has prepared a Notice of Appeal to the Court of Appeal where the issues would be decided by a court for the first time. So far Mr. Chris tie has paid $2,500 for the fine and owes $20,000 for costs and if he appeals, he would owe another $8,000 to $10,000 for the review plus an other sum of costs if he was to lose his appeal in the Court of Appeal. Were honour not at stake, the decision would there fore be easy.

Of course, if he were to win on appeal, all costs and fines could be struck down. This difficult decision will have to be made by Friday, May 29th and a filing made. This unfortunately will be done by the time you read this. Your ad vice would be appreciated.

We say go for it Dougie! Fight the man! If you're going to loose, you might as well go down in spectacular fashion.

Actually there's a lot of interesting articles in Dougie's newsletter; it covers the Topham case (where Christie request for intervenor status was first rejected, then later accepted, by the Tribunal), the Lemire case, the somewhat futile efforts of Levant and the speechies in Alberta and the ammendments to the Alberta Human Rights legislation, and a whole bunch of other fun stuff.