A Vancouver lawyer who was cycling across Canada to raise awareness of access to legal assistance has been killed in a road accident in northern Ontario.

Dugald Christie, 65, was struck by a van on the Trans-Canada Highway east of Sault Ste. Marie around 6 p.m. Monday.

Dugald Christie at the Supreme Court of Canada in August 2000.
(Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)

Police said he was hit on a stretch of the highway where a passing lane ends.

Christie was a long-time supporter of equal access to the legal system, regardless of a person's income.

Nineteen years ago, he began offering free legal advice to clients who were least able to pay for it, working out of the Salvation Army.

As head of the Western Canada Society to Access Justice, he helped set up dozens of pro bono clinics in Western Canada.

He launched his biggest fight for the working poor in 1992, when B.C. finance minister Glen Clark extended that province's sales tax to legal services.

Christie and other lawyers challenged the law and a revised version of it four times over the years.

Last year, the B.C. Supreme Court found that the law was unconstitutional to the extent that it limited the "fundamental right of access to the court of low-income persons."

Justice Marvyn Koenigsberg ruled that British Columbians with annual incomes below $29,000 would no longer have to pay sales tax on their lawyers' bills.

The judge also ordered the B.C. government to reimburse, with interest, more than $6,200 seized from Christie for unpaid sales tax.