TORONTO - Archie Campbell, a "brilliant'' judge who headed inquiries into Ontario's devastating SARS outbreak and the botched police investigation of sex-killer Paul Bernardo, has died following a lengthy illness.
Campbell, who made a point of appearing in court until recently despite needing oxygen tanks and help to get around, died in hospital Tuesday evening, a family member said.
He was 65.
Despite his long illness, friends of the gregarious and popular Ontario Superior Court justice expressed shock at his passing.
"I feel really quite shattered,'' said Roy McMurtry, Ontario's chief justice and a friend of Campbell's for decades. "Archie Campbell was really, in my view, one of the giants of the legal world.''
Friends and associates remembered the large-framed Campbell as a fun-loving, down-to-earth man who was extremely well read, intellectually curious and who treated everyone with compassion and respect.
He particularly loved a good laugh, they said.
"He had a delightful sense of humour,'' said Toronto lawyer Doug Hunt, who worked with Campbell in the early 1970s and later as senior counsel on the inquiry into the 2003 SARS outbreak.
"In everything that he did, he looked for the humorous side to it. He always enjoyed a good joke. In virtually every encounter with him, there would be laughter.''
Campbell, who worked in McMurtry's law office as a high school student for two summers, became a lawyer in 1969.
He joined Ontario's Ministry of the Attorney General during a period of intense law reform in the 1970s, working his way up to becoming deputy minister under McMurtry in the and garnering respect from counterparts across the country.
Appointed to the bench in 1986, he became regional senior justice of the Ontario court for the Toronto region from 1993 to 1996 before his appointment to the province's Superior Court.
"Our court has lost an icon and a giant of the criminal law,'' said Heather Smith, chief justice of the Superior Court of Ontario.
McMurtry called Campbell a "brilliant judge'' who had "not an ounce'' of pretence.
"He loved the courts so much that even in his condition of illness, he came to the court.''
Campbell would have needed a lung transplant, but that plan was scuttled by cancer.
In his report for the provincial government on the SARS outbreak, Campbell found systemic problems in hospitals and provincial government agencies. The three-volume report has underpinned changes in the handling and management of infectious diseases in the province.
Campell was too ill to attend a news conference earlier this year marking the release of the final report on the outbreak.
He also spent six months probing the botched investigation of Bernardo, who raped and murdered two schoolgirls in the early 1990s, concluding police made dozens of mistakes.
"That, I'm told by my police officer friends, is regarded as sort of a bible as far as the carrying out of effective investigations,'' McMurtry said, adding Campbell "just had such a joyful approach to life.''
Campbell is survived by his second wife and two adult children from a previous marriage.
