TORONTO -- She’s being remembered as a “tough-as-nails” newspaper reporter with a compassionate touch who was able to give life to her subjects with her unapologetic words and divisive opinions.
After nearly five decades in the business, longtime columnist Christie Blatchford has died at the age of 68.
Blatchford had been undergoing treatment for lung cancer in Toronto when she died.
Her brother, Les Blatchford, confirmed the news on Wednesday morning.
“We’ll miss her always,” he said. “She was a great gal.”
Blatchford began her career as a sports columnist for the Globe and Mail in the early 1970s.
John Moore, the host of the “Moore in the Morning” radio show on NewsTalk 1010, said Blatchford’s entry into sports journalism was a breakthrough in and of itself.
“She started off as a sports reporter in an era where a woman was not, absolutely not, welcome in a locker room and frankly, not welcome in sports journalism because they said ‘Come on, this is played by men, for men, what are you doing here?’ and she wrote about hockey like nobody else,” he told CTV News Channel on Wednesday.
Adrienne Batra, the editor-in-chief of the Toronto Sun, for which Blatchford wrote for many years, said the columnist changed reporting for women in Canada.
“She made every newsroom better. She made people around her better,” she said.
Blatchford’s writing wasn’t just limited to sports, however. The tenacious reporter was widely known for her coverage of some of the country’s most notorious criminal cases, including the trial of serial killer Paul Bernardo and the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Tori Stafford.
“Christie wrote from the courtroom with anger, with compassion, with incredible fairness, and with enormous heart,” Moore said.
Batra said you could often find “Blatch,” as she was affectionately called, sitting in the front row of the courtroom grabbing tissues and wiping her eyes as she jotted down notes.
“She changed the way we cover courts. She opened up the doors. She peered behind the curtain. She started telling more stories about the victims, the dynamics between the prosecutors and the judge,” Batra said.
Blatchford’s willingness to address sensitive topics with at times unpopular opinions meant she often courted criticism of her own.
Despite this, Batra said the resolute journalist “never backed down.”
“She did speak truth to power and she did it a manner that was, yes, somewhat acerbic, but very plain spoken and often right,” she explained. “Tough, but fair.”
Rob Roberts, the editor-in-chief of The National Post, for which Blatchford wrote columns and won a National Newspaper Award, said she was driven by empathy.
He said that empathy was apparent in Blatchford’s reporting on the deaths of seven-year-old Randal Dooley, who was killed by his stepmother and father, and Ashley Smith, who died by suicide while in isolation in an Ontario prison.
“Christie used her righteous anger and her empathy to bring attention to those cases and to try and make sure that those things happened far less often,” he said.
Moore, too, witnessed Blatchford’s empathy in her work when she told him about the time she dug up her old notebooks during the Bernardo trial for a recent book she wrote on Canada’s justice system.
“She found that the pages were stuck together and she thought ‘What’s this? Did I spill some coffee? Is there mould in the basement?’ and then she realized no, she had sat in that courtroom every day and she had cried and cried and cried and as she expressed it, in only Christie Blatchford’s words, she said, ‘Those pages were stuck together with snot,’” he recalled.
Blatchford’s fighting spirit was evident until the very end, when she vowed to beat cancer and continue working, according to her colleagues.
CTV National News’ Chief News Anchor and Senior Editor Lisa LaFlamme remembered first hearing about Blatchford’s cancer diagnosis during the federal election in October.
“We all thought, I especially thought, that if anybody can fight this, it would be Christie,” she said. “During visits with her at the hospital over these last few months, there was always that spark there. She was angry about the cancer. She really wanted to fight this. There was so much more she wanted to do.”
Roberts said Blatchford was already making plans for future stories she wanted to cover when she got out of the hospital. He said she wanted to write about the upcoming trial of the suspect accused in the 2018 Yonge Street van attack and another column about her experience with cancer.
Despite her illness, LaFlamme said Blatchford’s drive was with her until the very end.
“Right up until the end, this was a woman who never lost her spirit, her humour, and her fight for getting the truth out,” she said. “I just can’t even find the words to describe what we have lost in this country.”
With files from The Canadian Press
