Christie Blatchford, a veteran journalist and award-winning columnist whose decades-long career took her from war zones in Afghanistan to courtrooms deliberating Canada’s highest-profile criminal cases, died Wednesday morning. She was 68.

Blatchford had been undergoing treatment for lung cancer at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto.

The cancer had spread to her spine and hip by the time it was detected late last year, her nephew Andy Blatchford said Wednesday from Ottawa.

“Today we are all mourning the death of Christie Blatchford, a giant in journalism,” Mayor John Tory said in a statement.

“She worked tirelessly to shine a light on the justice system and how it works or sometimes doesn’t work — always with a focus on getting the story right and getting people to do the right thing.”

Born in Rouyn-Noranda, Que., in 1951, Blatchford moved to Toronto with her family when she was a teenager, attending North Toronto Collegiate Institute where she graduated in 1970. She studied journalism at Ryerson University before joining the Globe and Mail in 1973, where she was billed as Canada’s first female sports columnist.

Blatchford’s journalism career led her to a variety of publications over the years. She joined the Toronto Star as a feature writer in 1977, the Toronto Sun as a columnist in 1982, and the newly-launched National Post as a columnist in 1998, before joining the Globe and Mail again in 2003.

“She was feisty and went through life employing a generous use of the F-word. She was fair and to my knowledge the accuracy of her work was never in question,” former Toronto Star managing editor Mary Deanne Shears said.

Shears used the word “fearless” to describe Blatchford, someone who never shied away from telling truth to power.

“The world of journalism is a sadder and quieter place without her unique voice,” Shears said.

Blatchford’s coverage of crime, cops and courts amassed a large audience drawn to her sharp wit and oft-controversial takes. She won the National Newspaper Award for column writing in 1999.

Justice Michael Moldaver of the Supreme Court of Canada said he had known Blatchford for the better part of the past 30 years.

“We lost a great Canadian and a great friend. It’s a very sad day,” he told the Star from his Ottawa office.

Moldaver said he’ll remember Blatchford as an honest and sincere person with “a heart of gold” who brought common sense and compassion to her work.

“She was a straight shooter. Whether you liked what she was saying or not, you always knew where she stood,” he said. “You have to respect someone who told it the way she saw it.”

On Wednesday morning, at the sentencing of two Toronto men convicted of sexual assault, Superior Court Justice Michael Dambrot paid tribute to Blatchford.

“Just before we rise, I want to personally acknowledge my sadness at the death of Christie Blatchford, who spent many days seated in my courtroom and who I believe to be a very fearless journalist,” Dambrot told the courtroom.

Criminal defence lawyer Marie Henein described an unapologetic, tough-as-nails writer whose pieces captured the “humanity” of a courtroom. Judges and lawyers turned to her coverage first, she said.

“Her perspective was unswayed by popular opinion and unvarnished. Sometimes you liked it, sometimes you didn’t. But the one thing you could not do is ignore it,” said Henein, adding she refused to consume any press coverage of her high-profile 2016 Jian Ghomeshi trial at the time, except for Blatchford’s daily video recaps.

“People were afraid of what she would say — what she would say about the case, what she would say about their clients and what she would say about them,” Henein said. “She was a very powerful presence.”

Toronto Sun courts reporter Sam Pazzano, who has known Blatchford since 1983 and worked with her in court for more than 26 years, described her loss as “immeasurable.”

“She wept in court because she had deep empathy for victims, especially of domestic violence and heartless child murders. Her anguish and passion was in every column,” Pazzaono said.

“She never took her position for granted. She’d line up in -10 C conditions for hours to be first in line for trials. She was a great journalist and a greater friend.”

Blatchford’s incredible empathy for victims of crime drove her need to write their stories, said Alison Uncles, editor of Maclean’s magazine.

“Christie would weep into the phone during breaks in testimony at almost every trial and inquiry she ever covered while we worked together,” Uncles told the Star. “She felt victims’ pain acutely, devastatingly so, and she carried the heavy responsibility of telling their stories. As an editor I often endured her famous wrath, to be sure, but she also showed me, almost daily, the kindness and humanity that lay underneath.

“Her journalism was infused with it.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Before returning to the Post in 2011, she was sent to Kandahar, Afghanistan on an assignment from the Globe in 2006-07 to report on the experiences of Canadian soldiers in the midst of war.

The trips were formative experiences that would shape the rest of her career, she said.

At a public speaking event in Burlington in 2007, Blatchford told a crowd that she had never asked to go to Kandahar; the Globe and Mail simply assigned it to her, and she said yes because she would never turn down a story. What started as a simple request turned into a “profoundly life-altering experience,” she said.

From her reporting in Afghanistan came “Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army,” Blatchford’s first of four non-fiction books, which went on to win the Governor General’s Literary Award in non-fiction writing in 2008.

“It was scary, so raw and so important at the time, that nothing else will really match that experience,” she later told the Post. “I loved being with the soldiers, I loved the fear, I loved the excitement, the whole thing.”

In 2011, Blatchford returned to the National Post to continue as a columnist, where she turned her attention again to court reporting. When asked about the decision to leave the Globe by a J-Source reporter on the night of her farewell party, she said: “The whole time I was at the Globe I still talked about the fact that my heart is with the Post.”

Her extensive coverage of the justice system — where she witnessed trials as grisly as Paul Bernardo’s serial murder and rape case and as polarizing as Jian Ghomeshi’s sexual assault case — led her to write “Life Sentence: Stories from four decades of court reporting,” where she laid bare the shortcomings of legal proceedings and the role of judges.

The book was a finalist for the 2016 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. In their citation, the award’s jury labelled Blatchford “the supreme doyenne of Canada’s court reporters.”

At Queen’s Park, where politicians sometimes felt the wrath of Blatchford’s pen, Premier Doug Ford also paid tribute.

Ford told the Star on Wednesday that the veteran columnist “always called it like she saw it” and praised her for her pragmatism.

Former premier Kathleen Wynne, who spent time with Blatchford when she covered the Liberals’ doomed 2018 election campaign, told Newstalk1010 that Blatchford was “one of my heroes.”

“There are tears not just across the city but across the country,” Wynne told host John Moore.

Beyond her journalistic endeavours, Blatchford was an avid cyclist and self-avowed dog lover. In an ode to her bull terrier, Obie, who died in September, she wrote: “We looked tough, sometimes, but mush on the inside. The qualities he had in spades — goodness, kindness, clownishness — are nowhere near as abundant in me. I could only aspire to be as fine as him.”

She was inducted into the Canadian News Hall of Fame in November 2019.

National Post editor-in-chief Rob Roberts called Blatchford a “towering figure” well beyond the media scene, as well as a strong feminist.

“She refused to see women as inherently victims, which doesn’t mean that when women were victimized, she wasn’t full of empathy. But she saw women as having full agency, and as a result, she viewed the male-female dynamic differently than some of the world did,” said Roberts, also a former Canadian Press editor.

He noted that she was one of the first women to go into sports writing — and male dressing rooms — and in her early days, was often the only woman in the newsroom.

“(She) opened the doors for a lot of other women by dint of her force of will and sheer professionalism.”

In a recent interview reflecting on her career, Blatchford told the Post she was drawn to stories about life and death.

“It’s about processes that are important to the country, whether a military process or criminal court process,” she said. “I don’t give a f— about a celebrity book or any kind of other story. I care about stories that tell us why the system matters, why things are worth protecting, why the rule of law is important.”

She is survived by older brother Les Blatchford and his wife Marilyn; her niece Lori Blatchford and her husband Jean-Francois and their three daughters; and her nephew Andy Blatchford and his wife Gulnaz.

With files from The Canadian Press, Gilbert Ngabo, Jenna Moon, Robert Benzie and Alyshah Hasham