Feds take broom to witchcraft laws

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 wideranging 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.” The last time someone was killed in a duel in Canada is believed to have been in 1833, when 20-yearold Robert Lyon was shot 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 would likely still get witches and duellers arrested.

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.