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Ex-Mountie has been fighting 20 years for compensation for injuries suffered during off-duty attack
Tom Christie believed he was doing his job when he waded into a crowd of drunken, rowdy teens at a Calgary park.
Instead, the teens turned on the vacationing Mountie in July 2004, striking his body upwards of 50 times, leaving the front-line RCMP constable with a head injury and setting Christie up for a battle with Veterans Affairs Canada, which handles compensation claims for Mounties, that’s been going on now for two decades.
Christie was biking with his three sons around 8 p.m. on July 23, 2004. He remembers confronting the group of four or five teens after sending his boys, ages eight, 10 and 13 at the time, home.
Based on his training, Christie believed he couldn’t ignore potential trouble, even though he was on vacation.
Recruits “were told we were on duty 24/7; that if you saw a situation, you had to intervene,” he said Tuesday in an interview from Calgary.
“You just can’t walk away.”
The teens were throwing their empty cans on the ground, Christie said.
“There were senior citizens walking. There were moms with their kids in swings,” he said.
“I went over to talk to the kids to get them to clean up and it didn’t go well. Some of them ended up attacking me and knocking me down.”
From there, he doesn’t recall much about the beating. “I was told that I had said, ‘I’m going to phone Calgary Police Service.’ And that’s when the violence started.”
A 17-year-old and a 15-year-old were eventually convicted for beating him up. “They received seven months each for aggravated assault,” Christie said.
After receiving a decision earlier this year from a Veterans Affairs reconsideration panel indicating he was entitled to full compensation for his closed head injury and left facial nerve palsy, Christie, now 67 and retired, figured the fight was over. But he learned recently that compensation will equate to nothing.
“I am now appealing again as there are lingering issues. After all, I was booted in the head 30 times,” Christie said. He is seeking compensation to make up for his reduced quality of life and pain and suffering.
According to Veterans Affairs, it considered neuropsychiatric testing performed on Christie the year after his attack, his annual RCMP medical exam from 2011, and a note from a doctor written a decade later.
“Based on the information we reviewed, your disability remains assessed at nil at this time,” according to an Oct. 28 letter Christie received from Veterans Affairs.
It went on to say Christie is “entitled to receive treatment for this condition,” but he does “not qualify for a monetary benefit.”
When that letter landed, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, here we go again,’” Christie said. “The long battle to get the point established where I was considered to be on duty took a long time and a lot of work. It’s like the left hand’s not talking to the right hand at Veterans Affairs.”
The decisions from Veterans Affairs come on the heels of an October 2024 Federal Court ruling from Justice Phuong Ngo indicating that it was wrong to deny Christie compensation for the head injury he suffered while he was on vacation because it was not directly connected to his RCMP service, even though a report at the time clearly drew that link.
Christie, an RCMP officer from April 1982 until November 2013, spent the last two decades trying to convince authorities he was acting as a police officer when he approached the drunken teens causing a disturbance in a green belt near Calgary’s Shawnessy Community Centre.
“Although (Christie) was not in uniform at the time, he considered it his duty as an off-duty police officer to intervene,” Ngo said last year.
Christie wound up in a hospital trauma ward for six days with head injuries.
He “experienced significant and ongoing difficulty” because of his injuries, said the judge.
Christie “was unable to return to work until late 2004, at which time he was only able to work half days in the office for a maximum of three to four days per week,” according to her ruling.
He “suffered post-concussion difficulties, amnesia and cognitive and perceived neurological abnormalities,” as a result of the attack, Ngo said. “It is also clear that (Christie’s) memory of the events in question was affected as a result of the injuries he sustained.”
Veterans Affairs had been denying Christie disability benefits for his head injuries since July 2005, concluding that they weren’t “directly connected” with his RCMP service.
The judge pointed to a hazardous occurrence investigation report prepared just days after the attack, while Christie was still in hospital. Veterans Affairs had discounted it for decades, believing wrongly that it was made two years after Christie’s assault. The report noted “he was off duty but acting in his capacity as a police officer.”
Ngo sent Christie’s case back to a different Veterans Affairs reconsideration panel for another look, which resulted in the decision earlier this year granting him full compensation for his injuries.
Christie said his short-term memory suffered after the attack. “I have check lists all over the place because of that.”
He also has trouble sleeping and suffers from anxiety and constant fatigue — problems that surfaced after the July 2004 assault “that are still present to this day.”
The attack had a profound effect on Christie’s family, especially his late wife, who passed away four-and-a-half years ago due to cancer. “After that, if I was ever late for something, she went into a panic.”
His sons were “frightened to death” after the attack, Christie said. “They thought the kids were going to come up to the house and hunt us down. My poor wife was just stressed beyond belief, which of course added to my anxiety levels.”
Christie now wishes he’d just phoned police rather than stepping in that day to school the rowdy teens.
“But that’s water under the bridge. I can’t change the past,” he said. “I can only work on the future.”
While he doesn’t know if he’ll ever get any compensation for his injuries, Christie isn’t giving up the fight.
“This is just a matter of principle,” he said.
If another Mountie is injured while off duty, but acting as police officer, Christie hopes his example will help them get compensation.
“At least this is a precedent-setting case for them,” he said.
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