Duffy defence lawyer no stranger to limelight
Bayne has worked for several high-profile clients
Don Bayne has an attraction to the underdog.
Or, as he puts it: “I seem to end up with the most unpopular people in Canada.”
And no one fits that description better than suspended Senator Mike Duffy, reviled and ridiculed across Canada for his alleged corruption and a client Bayne passionately believes to be innocent.
“The public perception of a person can very often be distant and distorted from the reality,” said Bayne in an interview with the Ottawa Citizen.
“Moreover, the public perception of the person’s case can be distorted,” he added. “Mike Duffy has a good case and we’ll hold our heads up high presenting his defence and trust it will succeed.”
During his almost four-decade career, Bayne has navigated some of the more complex waters in modern Canadian legal history: murder, war crimes, and extradition. He has acted in high-profile inquiries, including the 1993 Somalia military scandal, and the case of Maher Arar, the Canadian-Syrian engineer arrested in New York in 2002 and tortured in Syria.
Bayne has also defended senior Conservatives, including the late senator and key party election strategist Doug Finley, who was accused of involvement in alleged efforts in 2005 to buy the vote of independent MP Chuck Cadman on the minority Liberal government budget.
“It’s not like I have an ideological aversion to representing certain people, like those in the Conservative party,” he says. “I may disagree with their policies on justice — and I do — but that has nothing to do with my representing Sen. Duffy.
“I’m attracted to real, substantial cases where there is an important issue at stake. I truly believe in the case of the person I represent. I am not a mouthpiece.”
He adds: “The state has a natural tendency to want more and more control over people’s lives and they have powerful agencies to do it: police forces, enormous budgets, enormous influence. Representing the marginalized and unpopular in society, and holding the state and its apparatus to the rule of law, is critical.”
Bayne, who will turn 70 in July, has business interests outside law and chooses his cases carefully. He currently has just two clients: Duffy and the accused terrorist Hassan Diab, the 60-year-old Canadian academic extradited to France late last year and awaiting trial in a Paris prison.
Defence lawyer Mark Ertel, a partner in the firm Bayne, Sellar, Boxall, describes Bayne as the “best lawyer I’ve ever seen.
“Nobody beats him in preparation,” says Ertel. “He’s an old quarterback and he doesn’t take losing very well. I have a lot of admiration for several lawyers but I’ve seen Don do cases with all the big names and I never saw anyone who was his equal.”
Bayne is “a guy everybody else wishes they could be.”
Bayne says the expected national media attention of the Duffy case will be a “distraction but a sideline one.”