Criminal Code cleanup good news for witches

Witches, wizards and other connoisseurs of occult sciences are getting a boost from the federal government as it moves to get rid of laws banning their crafts.

And there’s also good news for experts in old-time duels: The law banning the challenge or acceptance of a duel is being removed.

The Liberals tabled a wide-ranging justice bill on Tuesday that, along with updating sexual assault laws, also cleans up the Criminal Code to scrub laws that are obsolete, redundant, or already ruled as unconstitutional.

So say goodbye to s.365, which makes it an offence to fraudulently “pretend to exercise or to use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration,” as well as using “occult or crafty science to discover where or in what manner anything that is supposed to have been stolen or lost may be found.”

And bid farewell to s.71, which prohibits “challenges or attempts by any means to provoke another person to fight a duel,” with a punishment of up to two years behind bars.

The last time someone was killed in a duel in Canada is believed to have been in 1833, when 20-year-old Robert Lyon was shot through the lungs by 23-year-old John Wilson in Perth, Ont., after a disagreement over the affections of a young schoolteacher named Elizabeth Hughes.

However, the existing laws against fraud, practicing medicine without a licence or firing a gun at someone would likely still get witches and duellers arrested. (In fact, the law against pretending to practice witchcraft has been used quite recently; police will now have to use general fraud charges.)

This bill is the government’s second phase of modernizing the Criminal Code, following an earlier bill introduced in March that removed laws on abortion, anal sex and vagrancy that had already been found unconstitutional.

Among the laws being removed in the new legislation is a prohibition on the publication or distribution of a crime comic, defined as “a magazine, periodical or book that exclusively or substantially comprises matter depicting pictorially the commission of crimes, real or fictitious.”

The law against publishing a “blasphemous libel,” which carried a jail term of up to two years, is also disappearing.

Specific laws against impersonating someone during a university exam, or falsely representing goods as being made by a person holding a royal warrant, are being removed because they’re already covered by general fraud or counterfeit laws.

One of the odder laws getting wiped from the books prohibits advertising a reward for the return of stolen property with “no questions asked.”

And another section being repealed makes it specifically illegal to commit “an act with intent to alarm Her Majesty or to break the public peace.”