Canada’s Criminal Law Codification Viewed and Reviewed
Nicholas Kasirer*
La r6forme du droit par la codification et son
histoire semblent fasciner tout juriste, et
notamment le juriste qu6b6cois. L’auteur ana-
lyse l’histoire et l’historiographie de ce genre
particulier de r~forme h partir d’un recent his-
torique de la codification du droit p6nal cana-
dien de 1892. Toujours conscient des pifges du
r6visionnisme et du prsentisme, il 6tablit un
paralle entre cette codification du droit cri-
minel et l’activit6 lgislative qui a donn6 nais-
sance au Code civil du Bas Canada de 1866.
Dans un deuxi~me temps, l’auteur va au-delh
des codifications elles-m~mes et examine
comment l’histoire de ces codifications a dtd
relates. Une lecture comparative des histo-
riques des codifications tels que narr6s par
juristes et historiens met en lumi~re les con-
traintes m~thodologiques sous-jacentes h l’ef-
fort de raconter ‘histoire d’une 16gislation. Un
survol de certains de ces textes 6crits par des
juristes qu6b~cois amine l’auteur h conclure
que l’historique de la 16gislation repr~sente
une occasion opportune de s’impliquer dans ce
que l’on a d6jA dcrit comme 6tant 1’<< histoire
interne du droit >. Dans la dernibre partie de
cet article, l’auteur se base sur la codification
du droit priv6 qudb6cois et celle du droit pdnal
canadien pour illustrer qu’une technique l6gis-
lative demeure contingente aux faits histo-
riques qui ‘entourent. II conclut en soulevant
Ia difficult6 de s’entendre sur une conception
universelle de la codification qui transcendrait
les diffdrents domaines du droit, les traditions
juridiques et les circonstances historiques.
Using a recent historical account of the codifi-
cation of Canadian criminal law in 1892 as his
point of departure, the author explores the his-
tory and historiography of this particular brand
of law reform which holds such fascination for
lawyers generally, and notably for Quebec
lawyers. Mindful of the perils of revisionism
and present-mindedness, he draws parallels in
the codification of criminal law and the legis-
lative effort which resulted in the Civil Code of
Lower Canada of 1866. The author then
moves beyond the codifications themselves to
examine how the history of Quebec private
law and Canadian criminal law codifications
have been told. A comparative reading of the
histories of codifications as recounted by law-
yers and historians affords an opportunity to
reflect on the methodological constraints on
the telling of the history of legislation gener-
ally. Citing some leading examples of such
accounts written by Quebec lawyers, the
author concludes that the history of legislation
may represent a useful occasion to engage in
what others have described as “internal legal
history”. In the final section of his paper, the
author uses the examples of Quebec private
law and Canadian criminal law codification to
reflect on codification as a modem legislative
technique and on how historically contingent
this legislative technique may in fact be. He
concludes by observing the difficulty in find-
ing any truly universal meaning for codifica-
tion that might transcend different disciplines
of law, different legal traditions and different
historical circumstances.
* Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University. The author would like to thank his col-
leagues G. Blaine Baker, J.E.C. Brierley, Daniel Jutras and R.A. Macdonald for their comments
on an earlier draft.
McGill Law Journal 1990
Revue de droit de McGill
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 35
Synopsis
Introduction
I.
I.
Conclusion
The Geneses of the Codes
A. Parallels in the Stories
B. Parallels in the Story-telling
Given Codification, How Is It Possible?
Introduction
One of the lesser tourist attractions in downtown Paris is the Emperor
Napoleon’s tomb: an oversized, above-ground marble casket that sits in a wing
of the Htel des Invalides in the seventh arrondissement. The tomb is the cen-
trepiece of a round room ringed with reliefs depicting the more successful
moments in the French dictator’s political career. In one of these murals, a man
in Roman garb (Napoleon Bonaparte playing Justinian) sits on a chair (the First
Consul’s throne) and speaks (il dit le Droit) while other men on bended knee
(the jurisconsultes) take dictation in a book (the travaux pr6paratoires for the
Code civil des frangais). The artist has provided the casual viewer with an
iconological clue: the words “Code civil” were (prematurely) carved onto the
covers of one of thejurisconsulte’s notebooks, signalling that the relief tells the
story of the codification of French private law done at Napoleon’s behest in
1804.
University of Alberta historian Desmond H. Brown and the Invalides’
sepulchral artist are part of the same great if unheralded story-telling tradition:
that of the codification of laws. Reading Brown’s The Genesis of the Canadian
Criminal Code of 1892′ is in part an exercise in discovering the story of crim-
inal law codification and in part an exercise in watching the telling of that story.
In this sense a reading of this and other accounts of codification match an icono-
logical study of the Invalides’ relief: a study which turns in part on the image
itself and in part on the person who depicted it.
‘(Toronto: University of Toronto, 1989).
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
But surely a picture of Napoleon is the wrong icon for making sense of the
genesis of a Canadian criminal code. A better choice would no doubt be a por-
trait of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the father of the ill-fated English criminal
codification of the 1870s or perhaps one of George Wheelock Burbidge, the
civil servant then Exchequer Court judge largely responsible for drafting, cut-
ting and pasting together the Canadian Criminal Code, 1892. Not only is the
spiritual paternity wrong (Napoleon is of course first associated with the codi-
fication of private, not public law) but so too is the legal tradition: Canada defin-
itively threw over French criminal law in favour of the “Certainty and Lenity”
of English law in 1774.2 The lapse is to some extent excusable for a Quebecker
who, in reading Brown’s book, is inclined to look to private law codification as
a point of reference, particularly that which resulted in the promulgation of the
Civil Code of Lower Canada on August 1, 1866, more than twenty-five years
before the coming into force of Canada’s first Criminal Code. Furthermore, it
is not just the local story of codification, but the local telling of that story –
ably done by John E.C. Brierley some twenty two years ago in his “Quebec
Civil Law Codification Viewed and Reviewed”‘ –
that forms the background
against which a Quebec lawyer might be inclined to understand The Genesis of
the Canadian Criminal Code of 1892.
It seems unthinkable that a Quebec jurist, reflecting on the possibility of
a codification of criminal law one hundred years ago, would not hold up by way
of comparison the 1866 private law experiment which had already dominated
legal thought in Quebec for a generation before the genesis of the Canadian
criminal code began in earnest. Thomas-Jean-Jacques Loranger4 was one of
many Quebeckers not shy to draw the parallel in his well-known plea for crim-
inal law codification in 1874:
Faites pour tous les hommes et pour les contenir dans les bomes de la morale et
de l’honn&et6 par des peines criminelles, qui sont la sanction de ses prohibitions,
2An Act for making more effective provision for the Government of the Province of Quebec in
North America, 14 Geo. II, c. 83 (U.K.), s. XI [indexed as The Quebec Act, 1774, R.S.C. 1985,
Appendix II, No. 2].
3(1968) 14 McGill L. J. 521. I owe the title of the present note to this text.
4Advocate, legislator, judge and law-reformer, Loranger (1823-1885) was a key-player in the
codification ‘movement’ in Canada and one whose role is underexplored. In addition to his active
interest in private law and criminal law codification, he chaired a commission considering the
(re)codification of Quebec civil procedure: see Travaux de la Commission de codification des sta-
tuts sur les rigimesjudiciaires (Quebec, 1882) and Loranger, “DMfense des statuts sur les rdformes
judiciaires contre la critique de M. lejuge Ramsay” (1882) 4 La Thrmis 193 and passim. Loranger,
a French-Canadian nationalist who died in office as the president of the Soci~t6 St.-Jean Baptiste,
opposed certain of Sir George-Etienne Cartier’s efforts for codification on the basis that they would
anglicize French-Canada through law: see Jean-Charles Bonenfant, “Loranger”, Dictionary of
Canadian Biography, vol. XI (Toronto: U. of T. Press, 1982) at 259.
REVUE DE DROIT DE McGILL
[Vol. 35
la loi criminelle comme la loi civile doit etre connue de tous, et comme ]a loi civile
elle ne se popularisera jamais sans codification5
and has –
Thus the instinct to codify Canadian criminal law had –
a nat-
ural first cousin for Quebec lawyers. This is, of course, only a small part of the
story that Desmond Brown sets out to tell in his book although, to the Alberta
historian’s considerable credit, he saw fit to draw the parallel on occasion
throughout his narrative.6 I am encouraged in my provincial reading of Brown’s
work by three additional considerations: my sense that, rightly or wrongly,
Quebec lawyers seeking a better understanding of the shape of criminal law
continue to look, wittingly or unwittingly, to the Civil Code of Lower Canada
as a point of reference; second, that non-Quebeckers reflecting on the genesis
of the Criminal Code could profit from the parallel; and, third, for the natural
occasion that Brown’s book provides to reflect on codification as a legislative
and political technique in law reform at a time when both criminal and private
lawyers are touting the word “codification” in perhaps too cavalier a manner to
describe their work in the early 1990s.
Quebec lawyers may currently be trained to ignore this parallel between
1892 and 1866 but, once stated, the parallel becomes obvious and striking.7
Here are two nineteenth century derivative codifications, both closely based on
foreign models from a mother country. Both were adopted in response to an
urgent sense that the protracted and peculiar development of received law had
gone awry. Both were preceded by a consolidation of applicable statutory law
5Later reprinted in (1879) 1 La Thdmis 271 at 273. See also, among many others, Loranger, “Le
Droit civil du Bas-Canada suivant l’ordre du Code ‘ (1869) 1 Rev. Lg. 1 at 9 and B.-A.T de
Montigny, “La codification des lois f&16rales” (1882) 4 La Th~mis 317, 326, 353. The full impli-
cations of the idea that Canadian criminal law had to be codified before it could properly take root
in Quebec society are explored in Andr6 Morel, “La rception du droit criminel anglais au Qu6bec
(1760-1892)” (1978) 13 R.J.T. 449 esp. at 533-540.
61n a footnote to his chapter on consolidation and codification before Confederation, Brown,
supra, note 1 at 88 n. 57, says that the work of the Commission convened in 1857 to codify the
private law of Lower Canada was an “important and interesting development … beyond the scope
of this study, but those who wish to learn about its historical development could not do better than
to read John Brierley’s informative ‘Quebec’s Civil Law Codification’ (1968) 14 McGill Law
Journal 521-89.” He did make several references to the history of the Quebec legal system (see
e.g. at 44-46, 55ff.); and to codification as part of the broader civilian tradition (see e.g. at 14 on
Roman law, at 17 n. 42 on the Napoleonic Code, and at 125-26 on the codification of French crim-
inal law).
7There is a small but vocal number of Quebec scholars who have hinted that public and private
law codifications are worth comparing, especially from an historical perspective: see, e.g., various
works by Andr6 Morel including successive editions of his teaching materials, Histoire du droit
(Montreal, Universit6 de Montr6al mimeograph, 1988) and “La r6ception du droit criminel anglais
au Qu6bec (1760-1892)” supra, note 5; works by G. Blaine Baker, including his teaching materials,
Studies in Canadian Legal History, 2 vols (Montreal: McGill University mimeograph, 1984-87);
and Jean-Maurice Brisson, La formation d’un droit mixte – L’evolution de la procedure civile de
1774 ei 1867 (Montreal: Th6mis, 1986) passim.
1990]
CANADA’S CRIM[NAL LAW CODIFICATION
that was more normative than administrative in its design and execution. Both
were the work of law reform commissions dominated by a handful of strong
personalities. Both codifications had, for some, wider symbolic importance in
the political communities into which they were introduced. And, most strikingly
and most underexplored, the final products bear comparison. If there was a
shared political and legislative mission between the group of Canada East civil
law codifiers, on the one hand, and the group of Ottawa criminal law codifiers
on the other, it might be a reasonable exercise to compare the two codes. The
temptation to go beyond drawing parallels, after reading Brown’s book, is dif-
ficult to resist.
Similarly, the accounts of the two codifications bear comparison. Both
Brown, a history professor interested in law, and Brierley, a law professor inter-
ested in history, relied on primary materials to avoid lawyerly habits of present-
mindedness and revisionism in reading their respective codes. Both examined
the political and legal contexts into which rules were introduced, both consid-
ered the different actors involved and their influences on the codes. Most impor-
tantly, both the work of Desmond Brown and J.E.C. Brierley bear plain mes-
sages for the reader – Quebecker or otherwise – who seeks to learn what a
code is (or was) by looking at its origins. It is fair to look for parallels between
the stories of Canadian criminal law and Quebec civil law codification (IA) and
parallels between Brown’s and Brierley’s accounts of those two stories (IB) in
reading The Genesis of the Canadian Criminal Code of 1892. Finally, given
codification, how is it possible? (I)
The Genesis of the Canadian Criminal Code of 1892, a book presented by
the Osgoode Society,’ is a re-worked version of the author’s doctoral thesis in
history which he defended in 1986.’ In an epilogue added to the thesis for pub-
lication, Brown brings the history down to the present by signalling its rele-
vance for the Law Reform Commission of Canada’s blueprints for “recodi-
fying” substantive criminal law and procedure.
8The Osgoode Society was incorporated in May, 1979 by the Law Society of Upper Canada to
promote the study of the history of the law, the legal profession and the judiciary: see CJ.N. Kates,
“The Osgoode Society: Preservation of Legal Records” in Proceedings, Canadian Law in History
Conference. June 8-10, 1987 (Ottawa: Carleton University mimeograph, 1987) vol. I, 223.
9Desmond H. Brown, The Canadian Criminal Code, 1892: A Comparative Study in Codification
(Phd. thesis, University of Alberta, 1986) ISBN 0315301899 [unpublished]. Most of what appears
in the book appears in the thesis, though the latter includes chapters on the origins of law codes
in the ancient world, the development of penal codes in France and Germany, and developments
in English criminal law to 1900 which are all but left out of the book.
qlThis is the term the Law Reform Commission has chosen to designate its project: Recodifying
Criminal Law (Report 31) (Ottawa, L.R.C.C., 1987). While one might correctly object to this
‘recodification’ since it will replace something that was never a code, the violence to the term is
repeated since the proposed text is not a code either: see infra.
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 35
I. The Geneses of the Codes
A. Parallels in the Stories
I could not hope to catalogue the many parallels in the legislative efforts
resulting in the 1866 and 1892 statutes. There are just too many. More challeng-
ing still would be to explore shared ground in the social and economic circum-
stances bearing on the codifications. Here I will raise just two of the many
points in common. First, in what measure were the codes political symbols and
political devices? Second, what was the scope of influence of foreign models on
each codification? I view these two broad themes as benchmark issues for much
of the parallel political and legislative influences on the two codifications. The
second represents the threshold question for those examining the formal and
informal sources of the codified law, an issue which has preoccupied lawyers
and historians alike. As for examining the codes as political symbols and polit-
ical devices, I view this as a point of departure for a reflection on the codes as
social institutions, a matter which, judging from the literature, holds an impor-
tant interest for historians examining these documents and an issue which has
been a particular struggle for lawyers engaged in the same enterprise. I will con-
sider this latter point first.
A case can be made that both the Criminal Code, 1892 and the Civil Code
of Lower Canada were political symbols and political devices connected to the
entrenchment and promotion of a particular way of life in their respective polit-
ical communities. Brown cites the connection made by Sir John A. Macdonald
between national unity of a young and not particularly independent Canada and
a national criminal law. In his survey chapter on the origins and development
of the legal systems in North America, he describes the fractured character of
both the jurisdiction over and the sources of criminal law in Canada on the eve
of Confederation. Even as between the united Upper and Lower Canada in 1841
there was considerable disparity in the applicable criminal law, some of the
“certain and lenient” criminal law of 1763 producing rather cruel results in
Canada East while Canada West’s population was subject to a more benign and
relevant local criminal law. Indeed the first true effort to codify criminal law in
Canada –
the bills to consolidate criminal law for the Province of Canada
introduced by Quebec M.L.A. Sir Henry Black” –
came out of this politically
uncomfortable anomaly whereby two standards of justice purported to apply in
one (or what was supposed to be one) political jurisdiction. In other parts of
British North America the substantive criminal law varied considerably: the
“Brown, supra, note 1 at 56-57 citing Elizabeth (Nish) Gibbs, ed., Debates of the Legislative
Assembly of United Canada (Montreal: Centre d’.tudes du Qu6bec, 1978) at 710ff. [27 Aug.
1841].
19901
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
maritime and western colonies all had “English” criminal law, but each began
with a law of a different time depending on the circumstances of reception, and
each body of law having been adapted, to a greater or lesser degree, to the needs
of the local polity. 2 Radical differences in the manner in which justice was
administered also obtained across British North America prior to Confederation.
Brown concludes that this disparate jurisdiction over criminal law before
Confederation “resembled the decentralized civilian jurisdictions of France and
Germany rather than the common law parent of England”. And just as in pre-
codification France, there was a considerable political sense that the nation
would unite through uniform law. This moved John A. Macdonald to seek and
secure a broad federal power over the criminal law at Confederation in 1867 on
the theory that Canada’s nationhood was to be assured, in part, through a
national criminal law uniformly applicable to all Canadians. 4 Following con-
ventional wisdom,”5 Brown links the impetus to codify criminal law twenty-five
years later to this same political motive. Brown extends Macdonald’s pre-
Confederation rhetoric to the old leader’s post-Confederation mission of
cementing the union through a national criminal law. Brown notes that engen-
dering a sense of national unity among the Canadian people “was to be accom-
plished by giving them [the people] a common criminal law”. 6
John E.C. Brierley cites similar “political factors” in his account of the cir-
cumstances leading to the codification of private law in Lower Canada in 1866.
Those looking back on Quebec’s private law codification have sometimes
argued that the Code would represent what Brierley described as “an instrument
of legal nationalism”‘ 7. After the fact, many Quebeckers have seen in the Code
a political symbol: Louis Baudouin, a Quebec law professor who taught in the
nineteen fifties and sixties called the Code an “arme d6fensive de la race
121n an appendix, ibid. at 167-68, Brown offers his readers tables of capital felonies in British
North America between 1829 and 1841 and at Confederation which demonstrate variations in the
applicable law among the colonies. For an overview of the federal Parliament’s effort to consol-
idate criminal law after Confederation see Alan W. Mewett, “The Criminal Law, 1867-1967”
(1967) 45 Can. Bar Rev. 726. For a comparison of two such colonies, see L. Knafla & T. Chapman,
“Criminal Justice in Canada: A Comparative Study of the Maritimes and Lower Canada,
1760-1812” (1983) 21 Osgoode Hall L.J. 245. Brown has made his own contribution to this liter-
ature: “Unpredictable and Uncertain: Criminal Law in the Canadian North West Before 1886”
(1979) 17 Alta L. Rev. 497.
‘3Brown, supra, note 1 at 59.
’41bid. at 60.
‘5For a slight variation on this view see Graham Parker, “The Origins of the Canadian Criminal
Code” in D.H. Flaherty, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law, vol. I (Toronto: Osgoode
Society, 1981) 249 at 252 who argued that Macdonald simply sought to attain a measure of uni-
formity in criminal law.
16Brown, supra, note 1 at 92.
17Brierley, supra, note 3 at 528.
REVUE DE DROIT DE McGILL
[Vol. 35
canadienne-frangaise”‘ 8 and others have taken a similar perspective.’ 9 Brierley
himself was not convinced. On the strength of his reading of materials contem-
porary with the work of the Commission, he contended that there is no evidence
that the idea of codification was born with such considerations in mind, prefer-
ring to characterize the genesis of Quebec private law codification as “intelli-
gent law reform” rather than politics.” Others have subsequently agreed that
this was not part of the instinct to codify in 1857 when the codification project
took formal shape. David Howes has reconstructed a good case for the reverse
position: that Lower Canadian codification was viewed as a possible model for
the rest of British North America.2′ Patrick Glenn has suggested that the idea
that a different private law as a means of cultural demarcation and cultural sur-
vival is better associated with the twentieth century than with the codification
period.’ Finally, the most credible association between the 1866 codification
and a political agenda is made by Jean-Maurice Brisson in his thesis on the
development and codification of civil procedure in Quebec to 1867. Building on
Brierley’s analysis and paying close attention in particular to the speeches of
Cartier, Brisson contributes to the debunking of the idea that the Civil Code was
a symbol for French Canada, but instead suggests that if it symbolized anything,
it was the bilingual and bi-cultural Canada East that Cartier was trying to satisfy
with his code and his codifiers?3
That both Brown and Brierley raise the possibility that the codes they
examined had a symbolic or political function is suggestive. It is not, of course,
unthinkable that a particular law become the rallying cry for a political commu-
nity either because its substance is closely allied with the political sense of com-
munity or that it has come to symbolize the political community in a less formal
manner. A Quebecker might wear a badge saying “Ne touchez pas t la Loi
iSLe droit civil de la Province de Qudbec (Montreal: Wilson & Lafleur, 1953) at 61, cited by
Brierley, ibid. at 528 n. 18.
19The most cited examples are best associated with particular thinkers rather than a particular
“l’Action fran-
way of thinking: see, e.g., A. Perrault, Pour la ddfense de nos lois frangaises –
gaise” et notre systeme de lois (Address to l’Action frangaise, January 15, 1919, Montreal)
[pamphlet]; P. Azard, “Le Droit qubcois, piece maltresse de la civilisation canadienne frangaise”
(1963) 5 C. de D. 7 and “Le probl~me des sources de droit civil dans la Province de Quebec”
(1966) 44 Can. Bar Rev. 417.
2Brierley, supra, note 3 at 529.
21″From Polyjurality to Monojurality: The Transformation of Quebec Law, 1875-1929″ (1987)
32 McGill L.J. 523 at 528. This idea originated at the very latest with Cartier who made it plain
in “Discours sur le Code civil du Bas-Canada prononc6 le 31 janvier 1865” reprinted in “Document
historique” (1955) 57 R. du N. 586. See H. O’Brien (attrib.), “Sir George Cartier and the Civil
Code” (1885) 21 Can. L.. 127. The Codification Commission Secretary Thomas McCord made
a plea for a “Civil Code of Canada” in the preface to the second edition of his The Civil Code of
Lower Canada (Montreal: Dawson Bros., 1873) at iv.
z”Persuasive Authority” (1987) 32 McGill LJ. 261 at 291.
23Supra, note 7 at 117ff.
19901
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
101″‘ for two reasons: first, that the content of the Charter of the French
Language is so closely allied with political well-being in the wearer’s mind that
the law has become untouchable; or, second, that Bill 101 is reified – it is not
so much the law as law that is untouchable but the law as symbol that cannot
be tinkered with.
This said, it is difficult to accept claims that either the Criminal Code, 1892
or the 1866 Civil Code of Lower Canada had political significance for 1892
national unity or for 1866 French-Canadian statehood without courting the pit-
falls of present-mindedness or revisionism. The view of a pan-Canadian crim-
inal law as a harmonizing political force, linked to national unity and all things
Canadian, may be defensible to some today,’ but the bulk of the source material
uncovered by Brown suggests the contrary view: that codification was intended
in 1892 to unify criminal law, not unify Canada as a nation twenty-five years
before it had achieved nationhood on the battlefields of World War I. Similarly,
John E.C. Brierley’s conclusions ring true from a substantive perspective: the
content of the Civil Code of Lower Canada, at least at the time of codification,
was not designed to protect or define a political community. If indeed the Civil
Code is “a law of survival of the French-speaking community of Quebec which
is a separate reality within Canada”, as one leading Quebec scholar wrote
recently, it is hard to find authority for this in the constituent legislation for the
codification commission, their Reports, the contemporary debates and legal and
non-legal materials Brierley canvassed, or the even in the notebooks or cahiers
of the commissioners which he discovered relating to the period.27 It may be
24 The pre-enactment designation and now popular tag for the Charter of the French Language,
R.S.Q., c. C-11.
2This old theme continues to find expression in a segment of the doctrinal commentary on crim-
inal law: see, e.g., Alan W. Mewett, “Editorial [:] Criminal Law and Codification” (1975) 17 Crim.
L.Q. 125; M. Friedland, A Century of Criminal Justice (Toronto: Carswell, 1984) at 51. It is also
a implicit but recurring motif in Canadian constitutional jurisprudence affirming a broad interpre-
tation of federal jurisdiction over criminal law. Another perspective is, of course, possible. I have
argued elsewhere that one might view a systemic tolerance for an uneven application of national
law as itself having more of a positive influence on “nation-building”: see N. Kasirer, “Annotated
Criminal Codes en version quibdcoise: Signs of Territoriality in Canadian Criminal Law” (1990)
13 Dalhousie LJ. number 2 (forthcoming).
26Maurice Tancelin, “Introduction” in F.P. Walton, The Scope and Interpretation of the Civil
Code of Lower Canada (1907) (Toronto: Butterworths, 1980) at 20-21.
27This is certainly true if one examines the speeches of George-Etienne Cartier in the Legislative
Assembly made when the enabling legislation was passed: see “Discours sur la codification des
lois prononc6 le 27 avril 1857 i l’Assembl~e l6gislative” in Joseph Tass6, Discours de Sir George
Cartier, Baronnet accompagns de notices (Montreal: Eus~be Sen~cal & fils, 1893) at 129-130.
Brierley, supra, note 3 at 530 and others have attributed to Cartier an anonymous note, “De la cod-
ification des lois du Canada” (1846) 1 Rev. de 16g. et juris. 337 which described the purpose as
rendering comprehensible and accessible to both linguistic groups the “babel lgale” of private law
sources. In her doctoral thesis in history, Changement dans le droit privi au Quibec et au Bas-
Canada entre 1760 et 1840: Attitudes et riactions des contemporains, 2 vols (unpublished,
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 35
true, however, that in some quarters the Code today has been reified as a polit-
ical symbol and that the integrity of Quebec private law is allied with the integ-
rity of a Quebec nation.’ Indeed, the idea of the Code as political symbol merits
further study. The separate but connected question as to whether the Code was
intended to preserve the juridical specificity of Quebec private law allowing it
to become a symbol thereof is by no means agreed upon by modem day com-
mentators.29 But whatever the currency of this idea today, its origins seem best
associated with turn of the century Quebec legal thinking and not with the 1866
codification, although it most certainly marked the major project to recodify
Quebec private law in the 1960s and 1970s which resulted in a draft civil code.’
If both codes have been contemplated by some as political symbols, it
remains to be considered fully whether codification might be characterized as
a political device in both cases. One senses that there may be a broader socio-
political common ground between the two codifications when one considers
that the two small bands of lawyers involved in each of the projects were part
of comparable elites, separated by one short generation. Reflecting on a legal
system in which codification is as much a way of thinking as a legislative tech-
Universit6 de Montr6al, 1980), Evelyn Kolish traces the move to codify back to 1831 legislative
debates in Lower Canada where promoting accessibility and certainty were advanced as reasons:
Vol. ]I at 666 ff.
2Senator Arthur Tremblay gave vent to such a sentiment in the Senate Debates on the Meech
Lake Accord on Oct. 31, 1989, 2nd Sess., 34th Parl., vol. 133, No. 34 at 655:
On s’&onnera peut 6tre qu’un Qu6b6cois, lui-meme francophone, se permette de dire
que ce qui d6finit le Qu6bec en tant que soci~t6 distincte et unique au Canada, ce n’est
pas d’abord son caract~re francophone. Ce qui fait que le Qu6bec est diff6rent et unique
en tant que soci6t6 … et qui a 6t6 reconnu comme tel depuis au delt de deux si~cles
par l’autorit6 britannique, c’est son Code civil.
29For a strong expression of this view see P.-A. Cr6peau, “La renaissance du droit civil cana-
dien” in Jacques Boucher et Andr6 Morel, eds, Le droit dans la vie familiale: Livre di centenaire
du Code civil, vol. I (Montreal: Presses de l’Universit6 de Montrdal, 1970) XII who argued at XV
that “[i]l est … pennis de croire que la Codification de 1866, garantissant sur le plan juriduque la
s6curit6 et la stabilit6 des institutions frangaises, constituait pour nos anc~tres un gage de surviv-
ance des coutumes ancestrales.” See generally Sylvio Normand, “Un thme dominant de ]a pensfe
juridique traditionelle au Qu6bec: La sauvegarde de l’int6grit6 du droit civil” (1987) 32 McGill L.J.
559.30See Howes, supra, note 21; Brisson, supra, note 7. H.P. Glenn makes the case that the instinct
to protect the integrity of civil law is an idea that became popular considerably after codification
and largely due to the thinking of law professor and Supreme Court justice Pierre-Basile Mignault:
see “Le droit compar6 et la Cour suprme du Canada” in E. Caparros, ed., MilangesLouis-Philippe
Pigeon (Montreal: Wilson & Lafleur, 1989) 197. For a particularly telling version of Mignault’s
philosophy see Mignault, “Le Code civil au Canada” in Le Code civil 1804-1904 [:] Livre diu cen-
tenaire (1904), (Paris: Lib. Ed. Duchemin, 1979) t. 2 at 723. There is, however, some scattered evi-
dence of this being a concern in the pre-codification period: see, e.g., M. Bibaud, Comentaires stir
les lois du Bas Canada (Montreal: Crat et Bourguinon, 1859), passim.
31See P.-A. Crpeau, “Foreword” in Civil Code Revision Office, Report on the Qu6bec Civil
Code, vol. I (Quebec City: tditeur Officiel, 1978) at XXI and passim.
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
nique, a French legal theorist has suggested that there may be a close relation-
ship between the “codificateur” and the “codifi”: “une coincidence partielle de
celui qui formule la r~gle et celui qui en est le sujet”.32 Canadian scholars have
also recognized that the social class and political ideology of law reformers
have a very immediate impact on the shape of reformed laws and on persons
subject to those laws. Jim Phillips, for example, has explained the influence of
conservative ideology on criminal law reform in Nova Scotia in the mid-
nineteenth century.33 Similarly, G. Blaine Baker’s study of a Montreal law office
practising around the time of civil law codification in Quebec suggests a close
relationship between the preoccupations of Lower Canada’s social and political
elite and law reform,’ and like themes emerge in the work of David Howes,35
Evelyn Kolish36 and Tom Johnson,37 to name but these few. While the genera-
tion which separated the adoption of the Civil Code from the Criminal Code,
1892 meant that the same lawyers did not work on both projects, the socio-legal
elites from which codifiers were drawn bear comparison.
If the function of criminal law then, as now, was in part to protect one seg-
ment of society by controlling another, some study of the relationship between
“codificateurs” and “codifi6” (both as subject and object of codification) is in
order. Indeed part of the success of Brown’s method comes from the care he
devotes to depicting the dramatis personae of the genesis of the Code. A case
in point is the very vivid image of Sir James Robert Gowan3s who emerges as
32Frangois Terr6, “Les problmes de la codification A la lumire des experiences et des situations
actuelles” in Travaux et recherches de l’Institut de droit compar6, VlJme Congres international de
droit comparg, Hambourg 1962 (Paris: Cujas, 1962) 175 at 201. One might extend the “codifi”
to include both the subject and the object of codification.
33″The Reform of Nova Scotia’s Criminal Law, 1830-1841″ in Proceedings, Canadian Law in
History Conference 1987, supra, note 8, vol. I1, 480.
Soci6t~s 103.
System (1791-1838)” (1988) 3, Can. J.L. & Soc. 1.
34″Law Practice and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth Century Montreal: The Torrance-Morris Firm,
1848-1868″ in Carol Wilton-Siegel, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Lawyers and
Business, vol. 4 (Toronto: Butterworths, 1990) [forthcoming].
35Supra, note 21 and “La domestication de la pens~e juridique qud6coise” (1989) 13 Anthr. et
36″The Impact of Change in Legal Metropolis on the Development of Lower Canada’s Legal
37Perceptions of Property: The Social and Historical Imagination of Quebec’s Legal Elite,
1836-1856 (unpub. SJ.D. disseration, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, 1989). One of the important
themes of Johnson’s thesis is that, during this period, members of the legal elite became the spokes-
persons for Quebec history. This meant that in respect of the abolition of seigniorial title, “legal
terrain [became] the valid arena for ideological conflict in Quebec society” (at 9 and passim).
31(1815-1909), Irish-born lawyer, judge and senator. At 27, Gowan was the youngest judge ever
commissioned in Canada West. Brown describes him as a “dedicated and apolitical servant of the
government in power” and John A. Macdonald’s personal legal draftsman for over thirty years. See
biographical information in Brown, supra, note 1 at 62 passim and sources cited therein. Brown’s
research even turned up a chance meeting in Europe between Gowan and Mrs. Livingston Barton,
the daughter of Edward Livingston who is closely associated with the codification of the law of
REVUE DE DROIT DE McGILL
[Vol. 35
the eminence grise behind the legislative history of the Code: “As a source of
information of what had gone on before, Gowan was unequalled; as a legislative
draftsman, he was without peer; but as a parliamentary tactician, he was a
booby”.39 Yet the full scope of the relationship between the “codificateurs” and
the “codifi6” still needs to be explored. Brown skilfully describes political
double-dealing and personal peccadillos of those directly and obliquely
involved in the 1892 venture, but chooses not to speculate fully on the social or
ideological agenda of the elite that controlled the shape of the first Code.
In a like manner, Brierley gave his readers a part-picture of the “three fit
and proper persons” called upon to serve on the Lower Canadian codification
Commission.’ The parameters of the relationship between the “codificateurs”
and the “codifi” were fixed to some extent by the enabling legislation. As
Brierley explained in the opening paragraphs of his section on the modus ope-
randi of the Commission, the Commissioners were charged with reducing the
law in force to one document of the applicable rules “of a general and perma-
nent character”, to do so within the same general plan and the inclusion of the
same amount of detail as the French Code civil, and finally to suggest such
amendments to this body of law as they thought desirable, directing the atten-
tion of the Legislative Assembly to these proposals.4 Brierley described this
cadre within which “creative reform” was left open to the Commissioners and
then, through the exploration of their private papers which were the focus of his
1968 article, explored the extent to which this technically limited creativity was
exercised. He provided thumbnail sketches of the three Commissioners and the
three secretaries who assisted them.42 Brierley’s focus was the specific respon-
sibilities of each of these codifiers and, when the occasion presented itself, he
culled from their private notes thoughts and approaches they had in respect of
the titles of the Code that fell into each of their laps.43 But Brierley left for future
scholars the task of situating each of the codifiers socially and ideologically and
measuring how the product of their labours reflected the narrow segment of
society and political conviction represented on the Commission. What impact,
for example, did Charles Dewey Day’s anti-patriote, English-Montreal elite ins-
Louisiana and with whom, Brown surmises, Gowan discussed codification since the daughter
mailed Gowan a copy of the French translation of the Louisiana Code at a later date (at 99).
39Brown, supra, note 1 at 136.
‘Established by An Act to provide for the Codification of the Laws of Lower Canada relative
to Civil Matters and Procedure, S.C. 20 Vict., c. 43, s.1 (1857) [hereinafter The 1857 Act].
41Sections 4, 6 and 7 of the 1857 Act, ibid., as described by Brierley, supra, note 3 at 543.
42Ibid., Appendix II, 581 in which he introduces Judges Rend-Edouard Caron (1800-1876),
Charles Dewey Day (1806-1884) and Augustin-Norbert Morin (1803-1865) and secretaries Joseph
Ubalde Beaudry (1816-1876), T.K. Ramsay (1826-1886) and Thomas McCord (1828-1886).
43See e.g. Brierley’s description of Caron’s notes on divorce (ibid. at 560 n. 121) and of Day’s
“individualist philosophy” as it found expression in delict (at 565) and regarding penalty clauses
(at 569).
19901
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
tinct”4 have on the Book on obligations which he drafted? It seems unthinkable
to take the statutory directions to the codifiers at their word and read the Code
without contemplating the ideological preoccupations of those drafting it. The
view that intellectual history of a given legal system or culture can be as rele-
vant to the understanding of that system as the study of the rules which operate
therein could be a point of departure for future studies of codification.
Both Brown and Brierley embark on the perilous task of separating polit-
ical and legal influences on codification with considerable success. They both
set out a series of legal or technical problems to which the codifications were
designed to attend. Again, parallels emerge. Both codes were designed to sort
out competing sources; both sought to synthesize in the absence of a working
synthesis; both aimed at consolidating rules and ideas, and at heightening acces-
sibility of the law. Importantly, the notion that law reform would ‘reduce’ exist-
ing law to a ‘system’ is a recurring motif in both stories and in the accounts of
both stories. Rather than explore the full implications of this common experi-
ence here, I think it sufficient to signal that the some of the same legal factors
played upon the 1866 and 1892 experiments resulting in a more substantial
commonality in the final products than is generally acknowledged elsewhere.
One such common legal factor was the influence of a foreign model.
Both the codification of criminal law and that of Quebec private law
twenty some years earlier are generally held up against the foreign models with
which they are most closely associated: the Quebec project is compared to the
“monument de sagesse humaine”45 represented by the Code Napolion, while the
Canadian Criminal Code, 1892 is conventionally seen as a local version of the
James Fitzjames Stephen’s great ‘system’ for the law of crime in England, A
Digest of Criminal Law,” which later spawned the Draft Criminal Code pre-
sented to the British Parliament at the end of the 1870s. In both cases, the model
shaped the modeled law both as to substance and form, constituting a first-order
source of law and justifying a careful study as against its local progeny. But the
broader implications of the influence of the model, beyond its role as a formal
source of law, also merits study. Code-watchers must take care not to allow the
models to obscure other formal and informal sources of law or sources of inspi-
ration on the codification. Perhaps the most compelling tribute to the idea that
a model for a code relates more to an idea about law than a legal tradition is the
‘For a sketch of Day, see Carmen Miller, “Day”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, supra,
note 4 at 237. Baker, supra, note 34 at 10, 47 describes Day variously as an outspoken tory, a
ChAteau Clique lawyer, and part of an English Montreal mercantile elite with long-standing ideo-
logical commitments.
45Cartier (attrib.), supra, note 27. Thirteen years later, in 1859 (about the date when Cartier’s
Commission began the work in earnest), Maximilien Bibaud called the French model a “vritable
Eldorado de la jurisprudence”: supra, note 30 at 376, cited by Brisson, supra, note 7 at 143.
461st ed. (London: Macmillan, 1877).
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 35
story of the export of the Civil Code of Lower Canada to St. Lucia in 1879
under a British regime by a former Sorel, Quebec lawyer.47
Understanding Stephen’s draft code requires, to be sure, a full sense of its
role not just in the elaboration of Canadian criminal law, but its place in the
development of the common law of England. Brown’s study of what he
describes as the “untidy and unsystematic” evolution of the English law through
to the unsuccessful nineteenth century codification attempts is important not
only because English law was (and remains) a source of Canadian criminal law,
but also for the record he provides of the process of law reform. To be sure, the
connection between the law of crime in Canada and English law generally can-
not be underestimated. Brown does a creditable job going beyond the accept-
ance of the influence of substantive English law as an article of faith in charting
the relationship between Canadian and English criminal law from the Quebec
Act to 1892. The model, of course, had to be adapted to fit local circumstan-
ces,48 and, as this process of adaption progressed through the Union period,49
past Confederation, past the consolidations of 186950 to 1892, the relationship,
from a substantive point of view, became increasingly complex. The consider-
able care with which Brown treats the work of Fitzjames Stephen as a model
is -part of the author’s healthy sense of the importance of reconstructing the letter
and the spirit of the Canadian Code beyond its technical sources. Brown exam-
ines Stephen’s Digest carefully, both on its own terms and as a model for the
Canadian Code, describing it as a “systematic treatment … not unlike the French
or German codes in appearance and text, [though] it was not a code in the sense
that they were.”‘” Brown tracks the impact that Fitzjames Stephen’s work had
on each step of the process which ended in the 1892 Code: unearthing
47See NJ.O. Liverpool, “The History and Development of the St. Lucia Civil Code” in R.A.
Landry & E. Caparros, eds, Essays on the Civil Codes of Quebec and St. Lucia (Ottawa: University
of Ottawa Press, 1984) 304 for an account of how the Civil Code served as a model for private
law in a common law jurisdiction.
48This adaptation took on particular significance in Quebec where the influence of language and
local custom among advocates suggests that local circumstances have contributed to a distinctive
criminal law: see Kasirer, supra, note 25.
49During this period William Badgely introduced, as leader of the Opposition, draft codes of sub-
stantive and procedural criminal law before the Legislative Assembly. These codes, straying con-
siderably from the applicable English law of the day, merit further study: W. Badgely, Criminal
Law Bills, Third Session, Third Parliament (Toronto, 1850), described briefly in Morel, supra, note
5 at 538 and in Baker, supra, note 34 at 11.
50The leading text was a formidable adaptation of the English pre-Stephen Digest law to Canada
by Henri-Elzdar Taschereau, then one of the judges of the Superior Court of the Province of
Quebec: The Criminal Law Consolidation and Amendment Acts of 1869, 32-33 Vict., for the
Dominion of Canada, vol. I (Montreal: Lovell, 1874); vol. II (Toronto: Hunter, Rose, 1875),
described in Kasirer, supra, note 25.
51Brown, supra, note 1 at 24. Interestingly, Stephen himself used the same word to describe a
post draft code edition of this work as “a systematic statement of existing law”: A Digest of the
Criminal Law, 3d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1883) at iv.
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
Burbidge’s requisition for six copies of Fitzjames Stephen’s draft code and for
a personal copy of the Stephen Digest for the preparation of the Canadian
Deputy Minister of Justice’s little known 1884 draft criminal code. 2 Indeed
when Burbidge wrote his own Digest of Canadian Criminal Law in 1887, he
obtained the express permission from Stephen to follow the plan of his English
counterpart’s own Digest.3 When Burbidge, by that time on the bench, was
asked by Sir John Thompson, then Minister of Justice, to draft a criminal code
for Canada in late 1889, he and his team of codifiers put together a bill which
closely resembled the English model, or at least that is how it was presented in
the House of Commons by the Minister. Brown describes this as part of a polit-
ical near-conspiracy to cloak the Canadian bill in the moral authority of the
mother country’s draft.’ The truth of the matter, as Brown’s exegesis of the
Canadian text reveals, is that the Canadian content of the Bill was important. He
attributes 70 per cent of the 715 sections in the original bill to the Canadian
codifiers Burbidge, Charles Masters and Robert Sedgewick, even if they were
drafting “in the terse and economical style developed by Stephen.”’55 The final
product was, then, a mix of direct and oblique influence.
The Code Napolgon, in a very similar manner, represented both a substan-
tive and stylistic model for the civil law codifiers in 1866. To be sure, much
attention has rightly been devoted to connecting the 1866 Lower Canadian Code
to the one adopted in post-revolutionary France sixty-two years earlier. The very
terms of reference for the codifiers work made this most plain.56 One of the great
contributions of Brierley’s account of the codification is his description of how
Day, Morin and Caron organized the undisciplined mass of applicable law in
1866 into the cadre provided by the Napoleonic model. Most revealing is the
very structure of the cahiers containing the Commissioners drafts which
Brierley discovered at the Sminaire de Quebec. The three judges drafted the
proposed codal articles using four columns in these notebooks: one for the exist-
ing law, one for the corresponding French provision, one for the proposed
amendments and one for remarks, if any.57 The image conveyed by Brierley of
the codifiers copying out by hand each provision of the French code before con-
templating it as against the applicable local law is a powerful reminder of the
52Brown, ibid. at 109-111.
53See A Digest of the Criminal Law of Canada (Toronto: Carswell, 1890) discussed by Brown,
ibid. at 121. In Burbidge’s Digest, propositions of criminal law were presented as “articles” of a
would-be code.
54Brown, ibid. at 126ff.
55Ibid. at 124.
56Section 7 of the 1857 Act, supra, note 40 directed that the future Civil Code and Code of Civil
Procedure “shall be framed upon the same general plan, and shall contain as nearly as may be
found convenient, the like amount of detail upon each subject, as the French Codes known as the
Code civil, the Code de Commerce, and the Code de Procidure Civile”.
57Brierley, supra, note 3 at 563.
REVUE DE DRO1T DE McGILL
[Vol. 35
strength of the influence of the Code civil des frangais on the substance and
style of the rules drafted by the three Canada East judges.
The fact that the Code Napoleon and Stephen’s Digest figured so promi-
nently on the codifiers’ desks is a formidable distraction for those inclined to
test the notion that other legal sources can be linked to the codes outside of the
classical French civil law and English criminal law traditions. An obvious
example which is ripe for further study concerns the influence of and the legal
sources associated with the American codification movement of the 1820s to
1860s. What was the connection between the instinct to ‘systematize’ Canadian
private and public law (which began to manifest itself in the 1830s and 1840s)
and equivalent instincts in the United States? Reading Charles M. Cook’s lead-
ing study, The American Codification Movement [:1 A Study of Antebellum
Legal Reform,” one cannot help but be struck by the number of themes similar
to the Canadian codal histories, particularly those factors encouraging what
Cook calls “lawyers’ reform”: simplification, rationalization, heightened acces-
sibility of law.
In what measure were the Quebec codifications of private law and proce-
dure a late hurrah in a wider continental movement which petered out in code-
statutes such as the Criminal Code, 1892? There are signs, for the moment scat-
tered, that nineteenth-century Canadian private and public lawyers were not as
inward looking as one might guess using present-day civil-law and criminal-law
isolationism as a guide. One example in Lower Canadian legal culture, among
many, is found in the report of the consolidation of the laws of Lower Canada
in 1842. This commission, which was to have included Charles Dewey Day
before the latter was named to the bench, looked south in its choice of form for
this important pre-codal consolidation:
Les commissaires se sont occup6s du meilleur format A donner A cette publication:
et en adoptant l’octavo royal, ils ont 6t6 guidds dans leur choix, tant par ]a pr6f6-
rence g6ndralement donnde t ce format par le barreau, que par la circonstance que
les statuts rdvis6s des diverses 16gislatures des Etats-Unis qui leur sont tomb6s
sous la main, sont publi6s sous ce format. Les commissaires ont pris pour module
le format des statuts r6vis6s de l’dtat du Massachussetts [sic], comme 6tant le meil-
leur sous le rapport de la grandeur, de l’impression et de l’arrangement des mati6-
res.
59
Even in terms of formal sources of law, the 1866 codifiers cited (albeit
rarely) American doctrinal writers and statutes beyond the Louisiana materials
58(Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press, 1981), esp. c. 4.
59A. Buchanan, H. Heney & G.W. Wicksteed, “Second rapport” in Les actes et ordonnances
rivisds du Bas-Canada (Montreal: S. Derbishire & G. Desbarats, 1845) at ix. Brown discusses this
consolidation at length, concluding that “[tihe ghosts of Justinian’s commissioners might have been
peering over their shoulders as they deliberated, because what they produced approximated the lay-
out of his Code” (supra, note 1 at 76).
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMNAL LAW CODIFICATION
to which the enabling legislation had addressed their attention.” In respect of
criminal law, a considerable degree of continentalism is prevalent in nineteenth
century Canadian lawyers’ materials,” including an awareness and sensitivity to
American legislative technique.62
G. Blaine Baker has developed this idea of a nineteenth century continen-
talist legal thought based on a careful study of law library contents and curricula
for courses of study in legal education.63 He reconstituted how Upper Canadian
(and other) lawyers thought by examining what they read, how they were
trained, what books they bought and who they bought them from. He found
striking evidence that Canadian lawyers had cosmopolitan tastes which often
went well beyond whatever the bounds that formal sources placed on their par-
ticular legal tradition or jurisdiction. Can this openness to other legal traditions
and these signs of a nineteenth century continentalism have influenced the local
codification projects? Brierley raised the possibility,’ as did Brown.’ Baker’s
work’ would suggest that legal models other than the Code Napolgon and the
60See e.g. Civil Code of Lower Canada. Sixth and Seventh Reports and Supplementary Report
(Quebec: G. Desbarats, 1865) in which Massachusetts legislation and leading American textbooks
of the day are cited. This is a different issue than that relating to the special relationship between
the 1866 Code and its Louisiana equivalent based on their shared civilian heritage, discussed in
J.P. Richert & E.S. Richert, “The Impact of the Civil Code of Louisiana on the Civil Code of
Quebec of 1866″ (1973) 8 RJ.T. 501.
61See e.g. Raoul Dandurand & Charles Lanct6t, Traitl thiorique et pratique de droit criminel
(Montr6al: A. Pdriard, 1890), in which the authors cited American jurisprudence liberally. The later
volumes of Henri-Elzdar Taschereau’s annotated statutes reflect the Supreme Court justice and
code-followers sensitivity to American sources in addition to the more conventional Anglo-
Canadian materials he used: see esp. The Criminal Code of Canada, as amended in 1893, with
Commentaries, Annotations and Precedents (Toronto: Carswell, 1893).
62See e.g. John Henry Wfllan, A Manual of the Criminal Law of Canada (Quebec, 1861) in
which the author encouraged lawyers to cite not just English and local cases, but authorities from
the United States and beyond. The book includes separate sections on Upper and Lower Canadian,
Nova Scotian, New Brunswick and Imperial statutes as well as, interestingly, the Code of Criminal
Procedure of the State of New York.
63″The Reconstitution of Upper Canadian Legal Thought in the Late-Victorian Empire” (1985)
3 Law & Hist. Rev. 219, esp. at 238-39, 243 for Lower Canada, passim for Upper Canada. Baker
demonstrates a widespread migration of books and ideas back and forth across the border.
a wider nineteenth century phenomenon.
64Supra, note 3 at 541 where he alluded to the place of Quebec civil law codification as part of
65See e.g. Brown’s discussion of the use of the Revised Statutes of Massachusetts and New York
by the Nova Scotia consolidation commission in 1851 and concluded that the American models
were used for style but not content: “the form [of R.S.N.S. 1851] was foreign, the substance Nova
Scotian” (supra, note 1 at 81). In addition, Brown makes mention of the American codification
movement in his chapter on English codification (at 16 n. 35, 22).
66See also G. Blaine Baker et al., Sources in the Law Library of McGill University For A
Reconstruction of the Legal Culture of Quebec, 1760-1890 (Montreal: Faculty of Law and
Montreal Business History Project, McGill University, 1987) in which a considerable migration
north of U.S. criminal law and early codification materials is documented.
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 35
Stephen Digest may flesh out the history of codification in Canada.67 Plainly, a
foreign model can be not just a source of law, but a source of inspiration, as
scholars examining other codes are quick to point out.68 Sorting out how a codi-
fier has proceeded by “mim6tisme”, as Brisson pointed out in respect of the
1867 codification of Quebec civil procedure,69 requires lateral thinking beyond
the usual confines of legal sources and law generally.
B. Parallels in the Story-telling
Part of the story is in the telling. The historiography of codification is, in
a sense, as worthy of study as the history of codification itself. Thomas
McCord’s well-known synopsis of Quebec private law codification published as
a preface to the first privately published English-language edition of the Civil
Code of Lower Canada is a case in point.71 McCord, an English-speaking sec-
retary to the codification commission convened by George-ttienne Cartier in
1857,71 described in rather uncolourful terms the “long and arduous labor, the
study, research and learning bestowed upon the work, by eminent legists
entrusted with its elaboration”.72 But in so doing, McCord showed his own col-
ours in respect of codification and law reform, which he saw as a process
designed to promote stability rather than change –
to conserve the apples rather
67Brown, supra, note 1 at 117, discovered an 1887 letter from Minister of Justice Sir John
Thompson to New York codifier David Dudley Field, which indicates that Ottawa was in touch
with American codification efforts at some level. In his essay on the 1892 codification, Graham
Parker’s review of the legal literature of the day reveals some discussion of the U.S. movement,
but he concludes that the “influence of American law and legal institutions on Canadian law is
rather hard to assess”: supra, note 15 at 254.
68See e.g. Clarence Morrow, “Louisiana Blueprint: Civilian Codification and Legal Method”
(1943) 17 Tu. L. Rev. 351 for an effort to systematize “the need of all peoples for a systematized
legal conceptualism”; Sanford Kadish, “Codifiers of the Criminal Law: Wechler’s Predecessors”
(1978) 78 Colum. L. Rev. 1098 suggesting that models for codification are not tradition bound;
M. Friedland, “R.S. Wright’s Model Criminal Code: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of the
Criminal Law” (1981) 1 Oxford. J. Leg. Stud. 307.
69Brisson, “La proc6dure civile au Qu6bec avant la codification: Un droit mixte, faute de mieux”
in La formation du droit national dans les pays de droit mixte (Aix-Marseille: Presses
Universitaires Aix-Marseille, 1987) 93 at 98.
70″Synopsis of the Change in the Law effected by the Civil Code of Lower Canada” in T.
McCord, ed., The Civil Code of Lower Canada, (Montreal: Dawson Bros., 1867) 1. Part of
McCord’s account is to be found in the prefaces to this and the second edition of his Code, supra,
note 21.
71Advocate, counsel to the Legislative Assembly, and later judge, McCord (1828-1886) replaced
T.K. Ramsay as English-language secretary to the commission in 1862 when the latter was dis-
missed for “political causes” that merit further exploration: see Brierley, supra, note 3 at 586 n.
28a. On McCord, see generally P.-G. Roy, Les juges de la Province de Quebec (Quebec City:
King’s Printer, 1933) at 359.
72Supra, note 70 at 1.
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
than to upset the apple-cart. 3 Needless to say, understanding the short history
offered by McCord requires sensitivity to the context in which it was written.
Participants write participants’ histories, and their accounts of their own work74
and the work of others75 are not so much suspect as special. It almost goes with-
out saying that a reading of any history of codification requires some measure
of sensitivity for the writer’s point of departure.76
What of the accounts of John Brierley and Desmond Brown? As I men-
tioned earlier, Brown is an historian and Brierley is a lawyer and both have tal-
ent and instinct for what radio announcers and university administrators call
“cross-over”. Part of the challenge in reading both Brown and Brierley today is
situating their work in what some have characterized as the new and at times
undisciplined discipline of Canadian legal history, or at least a brand thereof.77
Even a casual observer of legal literature and law school curriculum would
acknowledge the growing place of legal history in the academic discipline of
law, fuelled in large part by the so-called ‘law and society’ approach to law
teaching.78 One of the most important tenets of this new historical sensitivity for
730ne suspects that McCord may have been at the origin of the injunction against amending the
Code which appeared in volume 7 of the codifiers’ Report, supra, note 60 at 264 which he himself
cited later in a similar warning against changes which would “produce confusion, and destroy the
unity and usefulness of the work”: “Preface to the Second Edition”, supra, note 21 at iv.
74See e.g. J.C. Martin’s account of the significant revision of the Criminal Code in which he par-
ticipated, an account animated by the same sense of history and deference to the Fitzjames Stephen
model as was the 1955 revision: see “Introduction”, The Criminal Code of Canada (Toronto:
Cartwright & Sons, 1955) 1. While Martin’s work is generally held in the highest esteem, Arthur
E. Maloney noted a bias in J.C. Martin’s 1955 annotated Code given what he perceived to be
Martin’s close connection with the legislative revision team: (1956) 34 Can. Bar Rev. 491 at 492.
75See the nutshell history of criminal law codification by the President of the Law Reform
Commission of Canada in which the lesson of history is seen to confirm of the Commission’s pol-
icy in respect of its own work: Allen Linden, “Toward a New Criminal Code for Canada” in P.
Fitzgerald, ed., Crime, Justice & Codification: Essays in Commemoration of Jacques Fortin
(Toronto: Carswell, 1986) 163.
76See e.g. Louis Baudouin, “La gen~se du Code”, supra, note 18 at 61-110 in which the author
writes a history coloured by his views on the specificity of Quebec legal thinking, his provincialist
approach to constitutional law, and his fire-proof house approach to comparative law in the con-
tinentalist tradition. For an example of a personalized history of criminal law codification, see
Louis Wharton, A Manual of Canadian Criminal Law (London, U.K.: Fortune Press, 1951), c. 1
(“Of Codes and Codifying”) and 2 (“An Historical Survey”) in which the author’s anglo-centric
and code-wary view of the Canadian enterprise finds expression.
77See D.H. Flaherty, “Writing Canadian Legal History: An Introduction” in D.H. Flaherty, ed.,
supra, note 15, 3 at 4 where Canadian legal history was described as being in a “fledgling stage
of development”. See generally, D.G. Bell, “The Birth of Canadian Legal History” (1984) 33
U.N.B. L.. 312 at 313 in which a law professor makes a compelling plea for the view that “legal
rules are historically contingent rather than doctrinally inevitable”. See references cited in V.
Masciotra, “Quebec Legal Historiography, 1760-1900” (1987) 32 McGill L.J. 712 at 712 n. 2 and
713 n. 3.
78Flaherty, ibid. at 4 describes this trend as “an approach that goes beyond the narrow aspects
of legal developments to focus ultimately on the general relationships between law and society”.
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a social view of legal relations79 is a sense of the importance of what one of the
standard-bearers of the movement, Robert Gordon, has characterized as “histor-
icism”. Historicism is, for Gordon, the perspective that the meanings of words
and actions are to some degree dependent on the particular social and historical
conditions in which they occur, and to interpretations and criticism suggested by
that perspective. 0 Part of the success of both Brown and Brierley’s accounts is
the effectiveness with which they meet the challenge of historicism.
Legal historians, particularly those trained as lawyers and not historians,
are often criticized for drawing important conclusions from historical materials
without appropriate methodological care. In short, they sometimes do not show
appropriate sensitivity to historicism. In the review of a biography of English
jurist A.V. Dicey, David Sugarman listed some of these vices: “narrowly drawn
and shadowy treatment of the context in which Dicey worked”, “present-
mindedness”, “failure to question lawyers’ categories and values” and “reduc-
tionism””l. This chilling indictment was extended by legal historian Douglas
Hay about a year later in the same journal. He listed a series of errors of his-
torical logic which plague lawyers’ work when the latter stray from what he
described, from his historian’s perspective, as a range of legal mountains which
loom over the social landscape: moralism, presentism, rationalist view of legal
decision-making, false dichotomous questions, revisionism and more. 2
Does this mean that legal history is beyond the reach of lawyers? Lawyers
may lack more than the methodological training to enable them to “think like
historians”, to turn one of their own favourite exclusionary phrases against
them. If practising historicism requires the scholar to ‘contextualize’ and limit
his or her conclusions to those which are intellectually defensible on the basis
of materials beyond the normal reach of lawyers and judges, the problem may
be more fundamental. The problem is that lawyers are trained against doing
both these things. Law is often perceived to be anti-contextual: an idea defined
by a parliament or judge fifty years ago will be applied, assuming it is the right
rule, with no allowances made for anything but the most egregious anachro-
nisms in its original expression. Furthermore, the drive to explain is a powerful
one for a lawyer trained to expect that every problem has a solution, often to
be found in an another old problem that had a similar solution: this is a lawyers’
He and others trace this sort of preoccupation to the work of Wisconsin historian J. Willard Hurst.
In a recent report of a consultative group on research and education in law, the need for this type
of legal history was voiced: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Law and
Learning (Ottawa: Supp. and Serv., 1983) at 63 and passim. On this point, see Bell, ibid. at 312.
79Peter Linebaugh, “(Marxist) Social History and (Conservative) Legal History: A Reply to
8s”Historicism in Legal Scholarship” (1981) 90 Yale L.J. 1017.
81″The Legal Boundaries of Liberty: Dicey, Liberalism and Legal Science” (1983) 46 Mod. L.R.
Professor Langbein” (1985) 60 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 212.
102 at 104.
82″The Criminal Prosecution in England and its Historians” (1984) 47 Mod. L.R. 1.
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
skill called ‘recognizing precedent’. Indeed, lawyers are commended for com-
ing up with answers that learned authority only hints at: this is a lawyers’ skill
called ‘interpretation’. Finally, and most ahistorical, is the reason why many
lawyers engage in historical research in their ordinary travels. Too often lawyers
limit their excursions into ‘old’ material as a technique for coming up with a
right answer for a current problem. When one looks back for authority that will
persuade today, it is easy to understand falling into traps of presentism and revi-
sionism. In a sense, the whole idea of binding authority (if such a thing exists)
is ahistorical. To make matters worse, it has been suggested that lawyers tend
to use history conservatively, appealing to continuity and tradition which is at
the core of their discipline.83 So lawyers are not intellectually dishonest: they
just think like lawyers.’ One might expect the plague on the legal house to
extend beyond lawyers and catch those writing the history of legislation. This
is a particular risk when the legislation under study is one which, by its very
nature, is one that is supposed to last –
to transcend its immediate context
-like
a code or a constitution.
Brown’s work, in my view, survives this kind of critical read. The Genesis
of the Criminal Code of 1892 keeps to the announced purpose in its introduc-
tion:85 the history of the Code is told as a history, with attention to its political
evolution, the peculiarities of those who drafted it, and what their own purpose
was in the venture. Brown’s method is wrapped up in the complicated task of
reconstituting late nineteenth-century legal culture. Needless to say, writing
about an old law that is still, in large measure, in force today, is risky business
if one neglects to bring an historicist approach to the task.
Indeed, one senses that it was a first-order preoccupation for Brown not to
de-contextualize nineteenth-century materials and nineteenth-century thinking.
He takes care to reconstruct the culture in which the rules in the Code took
shape. Two very plain recurring motifs in the book give expression to this his-
toricist sensitivity. Brown takes care to account for the legal culture in which the
great event took place, in part, through repeated references to how the members
of legal communities of a given day were trained as lawyers and what books
they read along the way. In describing the legal systems in British North
83See R. Gordon, “Critical Legal Histories” (1984) 36 Stan. L. Rev. 57.
84Hay, supra, note 82 at 18 explains that “[b]y ‘thinking like a lawyer’ I mean the intellectual
habits which are purposefully honed in the course of most legal education and practice, but which
vitiate historical explanation.” To contrast, one need only look at some of Hay’s own work to see
how he sees ‘thinking like a historian’ about law. In “The Meanings of the Criminal Law in
Quebec, 1764-1774” in L. Knafla, ed., Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe and Canada
(Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1981) 77, Hay engages in an exploration of what he
calls “the social meanings of criminal law”: “By meanings”, he explains, “I mean the interpreta-
tions put upon legal institutions by the populations who used and experienced them”.
85Brown sets out his purpose in a series of rhetorical questions in the opening pages of the book-
supra, note 1 at 4-5.
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
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America in the nineteenth century he does not simply content himself with a
description of the various laws in force but, say for New Brunswick, he
describes the four-year clerkship required to join the Bar and examines a cata-
logue of the 348 volumes in the Law Society’s library to help the reader mea-
sure what it meant to be a lawyer in the maritimes one hundred and fifty years
ago.”6 Sensitivity to the history of law teaching and the contents of law libraries
as useful techniques for reconstituting other “idea systems”87 and avoiding the
perils on un-historicized conclusion-drawing are part of a healthy tradition
which has already affirmed itself among Canadian legal scholars.
Brown’s penchant for non-legal primary sources greatly enriches the book.
His hard work in sifting through unexplored or underexplored materials is par-
ticularly evident in respect of the correspondence he unearthed. As an example,
the fragments of the correspondence between Sir James Gowan and Sir Henri-
Elz~ar Taschereau in 1880 are most telling in that they help make sense of the
Supreme Court justice’s well-known attack on the Code soon after it was
adopted 8 and they add to the picture we have of this complicated and, for some,
misunderstood, Quebec jurist.8 9 The considerable effort involved in piecing
together the puzzle on the basis of primary materials was no mean feat for
Brown. As he explains in his bibliographical note at the end of the book, soon
after Confederation the Department of Justice became a depository for certain
papers relating to the 1892 codification. Not only are these holdings not open
to the public, but they are in a high state of disorder. Brown’s research is espe-
cially valuable for having cleared a trail and signalled an alarm for those con-
cerned about this part of our national heritage going astray.’
Yet Brown’s account does him credit as a history scholar but also, paradox-
ically, as a lawyer even though he is not one. One of the strengths of this book
is the special care devoted to the history of the Code as legislation. Brown’s
method reveals the author’s inclination to read laws and legal docu-
S6’This instinct is part of a growing sensitivity to matching historical trends in legal thinking and
historical trends in how lawyers are trained: see generally G. Blaine Baker, “Legal Education in
Upper Canada 1785-1889: The Law Society as Educator” in Flaherty, ed., supra, note 15, vol. II,
49; and a series of articles published over the last fifteen years in the Dalhousie Law Journal, not-
ably R. A. Macdonald, “The National Law Programme at McGill: Origins, Establishment and
Prospects” (1990) 13 Dalhousie L.J. 211.
87Gordon, supra, note 80 at 1048.
“8(1893) 16 The Legal News 36.
89See differing pictures of Taschereau emerging from Howes, supra, note 21, and, referring to
this correspondence, Parker, supra, note 15 at 273-76 and R.C. Macleod, “The Shaping of
Canadian Criminal Law 1892 to 1902” (1978) Can. Hist. Ass. Papers 64.
90Some scholars had enjoyed access to these documents before Brown (see Parker, supra, note
16 at 278 n. 40), but Brown’s notes contain advice on how to cope with Department of Justice
archives and how to obtain access to this important patrimony which he describes as disorganized
and mismanaged: supra, note 1 at 178-79.
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
ments as closely as would the highest-priced solicitor.9′ He brings this close
reading to many of the other statutes that litter the path he traces to the Criminal
Code, 1892, noting that the same verbosity that plagued Sir Robert Peel’s
English legislation also dogged colonial statutes.92 This analysis has the added
advantage of being refreshingly non-legal, allowing Brown to observe formal
rather than substantive niceties in circumstances in which a lawyer might have
done otherwise.93 This unlikely care with which Brown works through turgid
material, apart from leaving the reader with the impression that the author is a
talented advocate dans Fdme, lends considerable credibility to the author’s con-
clusions in respect of the legislative impact of each of the various stages in the
genesis of the Code.
If Brown is an advocate dans l’dme, a reading of “Quebec’s Civil Law
Codification Viewed and Reviewed” and other works by John Brierley point to
something of an historian dans l’dme in this career law professor.94 The success
of Brierley’s codification piece, written for the centenary of the Civil Code, lies
principally in its method and its intellectually responsible conclusions. His work
was not intended to record exhaustively the political and legal circumstances
leading to codification, much less the full complexity of the social environment
in which this event took place. Instead, Brierley’s focus was the modus operandi
of the Commission charged with the task of compounding, re-organizing and
suggesting changes to the laws of Lower Canada in civil matters, based on an
analysis of theretofore unexplored primary materials associated with the six-
year enterprise. Brierley had discovered a trove of papers in the Quebec
Provincial Archives and the archives of the Siminaire de Quibec: a folio vol-
ume containing the private notes the Chairman of the three-person codifying
Commission; the working papers or cahiers of the Commissioners, including
draft provisions of what would become the Civil Code; and the minute book of
91A typical example is his reading of English legislation drafted during the tenure of Sir Robert
Peel as Home Secretary in the Tory government of Lord Liverpool. The 1820s statutes concerning
larceny, procedure and the like were supposed to “break [the] sleep of the century” but, as Brown
explains, they more likely induced such sleep. Brown read these laws carefully, quoting a sample
for the reader, noting the “almost mechanical technique used to draft them, and the fact that each
section, regardless of length, was one interminable sentence, complete with enacting words, [and
thus] produced the most stultifying prose”: ibid. at 15, 17.
prove his point that 500-word sentences in statutes were not rare: ibid. at 72.
92Brown reproduces the 1809 Upper Canadian Act to Prevent Frivolous and Vexatious Suits to
93See his comparison between the shape of early nineteenth century colonial legislation and the
English model focusing on volume size, pagination and editing style, etc.: ibid. at 70.
94 See, among others, his doctoral thesis, Arbitrage conventionnel au Canada et sp~cialement
dans le droitprivd de la Province de Quibec (Doctoral dissertion in law, Universit6 de Paris, 1964)
[unpublished] passim; “The Co-existence of Legal Systems in Quebec: <
Since 1945: Cultural Paradoxes and Traditional Ambiguities” (1986) 10 Dalhousie L.J. 5; “La
notion de droit commun dans un syst me de droit mixte: le cas de la province de Quebec” in La
formation du droit nationale dans les pays de droit mixte, supra, note 69, 103.
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[Vol. 35
the Commission recording its regular meetings.95 The scope of his study was
purposefully limited: this newfound material would provide fresh insight into
the “attitudes and methods” of the Commissioners, but would not necessarily
provide the basis for conclusions to be drawn on the nature of Quebec society
into which the Civil Code was introduced. Mindful of the methodological limits
that he had put on his inquiry, Brierley provided the following caveat to his own
text:
In reviewing the reasons why any codification took place, it is certainly important
not to neglect the political (or economic or social) context of the country in which
it occurred. At the same time, it is manifestly dangerous to attempt to elucidate the
circumstances leading to or contemporaneous with such event by means of atti-
tudes that have only been produced by later historical developments. This is part
of the problem in the case of the Quebec codification: there was clearly a series
of compelling legal, technical and even linguistic reasons for advocating the cod-
ification of the law, and these alone still provide sufficient justification on which
to view it historically.
96
Not only did this distance, in advance, Brierley from those critics suspicious of
legal history practised by lawyers, it marked the author’s sober approach to
what remain intoxicating materials on which his study is based. And while
Brierley’s account of codification does not fall squarely within the Hurstian
‘law and society’ brand of legal history, it forms part of a successful genre that
seems to be particularly well-established among Quebec lawyers. Brierley
examined these technical documents on their own terms, bringing his under-
standing of doctrinal issues in Quebec law and then contemporary tensions in
the system of methodology of law. It would have been impossible to explain the
cahiers fully without a refined sense of what one nineteenth-century jurist called
the “samigondis”‘ of sources of Quebec private law.
Perhaps the most successful recent manifestation of this brand of lawyers’
legal history is Jean-Maurice Brisson’s thesis on the evolution of civil procedure
in Quebec from the ‘Quebec Act’ to the botched codification of 1867. 9′ Brisson
explained that his study of codification was designed to “reconstituer la physio-
nomie du droit en vigueur”.9 Like Brierley, Brisson was ruthlessly responsible
in the conclusions he drew from the material under study, much of which was
unexplored or underexplored. Like Brierley, Brisson had recourse mostly to
legal materials, that is writing associated with lawyers, judges and legislators,
95Brierley provided a detailed description of these papers in a bibliographical note: supra, note
3 at 575. He arranged for a copy of these materials to be placed in the collection of the Law Library
of McGill University.
961bid. at 526 [emphasis added].
97Term used to describe the incoherent mass of sources in Amury Girod, Notes divers sur le Bas-
Canada (1835) cited by Morel, supra, note 7 at 133.
98Supra, note 7.
991bid. at 27. He explained his purpose in more general terms in the preface at 7.
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
but, mindful of that, limited how far he was prepared to extrapolate beyond
those sources.
In a recent historiography of Quebec law, Vince Masciotra cited Brisson
and Brierley’s work as the most noteworthy of what he called “traditional legal
scholars [who] have instrumentalized the most venerable historical methods,
chronology and source criticism, in a positive quest for the sources of law.”””
Masciotra argued that there was a danger in this approach in that it promoted
a view that the meaning of law lies exclusively in legal texts. This criticism is
by no means new. Championed again by Robert Gordon,0′ it has recently been
applied to Canadian legal historiography by David Flaherty who borrows the
term “internal legal history” to describe the work of the historian who “stays as
much as possible within the box of distinctive-appearing legal things”.1″ This
is contrasted with the ‘better’ brand of “external legal history” which associates
legal “things” with the wider society of which they are a part, avoids the temp-
tation to exaggerate the contribution of the bench and bar to the community in
preference to a social history of law.
These categories have their critics;’ my view is that the distinction is
based on an overly eager association between lawyers’ legal history and the
worst evils of legal positivism. True, there are methodological limits on the con-
clusions one can draw from strictly legal materials. But all legal history does not
aspire to social history. Laws have their own history –
an “historicit6 interne
au droit”‘ 4 -, and one that has always had a well-deserved place in Quebec
legal scholarship where an understanding of the historical sources of law is an
important lawyers’ skill.'”5 Moreover, complete and responsible histories of
legal institutions such as the codes examined by Brierley and Brown form part
of the political history of a given community,'” as the even the standard-bearers
‘Supra, note 77 at 730.
101″J. Willard Hurst and the Common Law Tradition on American Legal Historiography” (1975)
10 Law & Soc. Rev. 44.
l7Supra, note 15 at 12 citing Robert Gordon.
103Flaherty, ibid. at 12ff. recognized that these categories were not black and white. See also
David Kettler, “The Question of ‘Legal Conservatism’ in Canada” (1983) 18 J. Can. Stud. 136 at
142 who contends that the distinction makes light of the necessary attention of which “forms and
reasonings of law” are deserving. David Bell, supra, note 77 at 318 warns of the dangers of an
American model embracing such ideas without reflection of the specificity of Canadian
historicism.
104See this idea as developed by Frangois Ewald, “Droit et histoire” in Droit, nature, histoire:
IVieme Colloque de l’Association Frangaise de Philosophie du Droit, 1984 (Aix-Marseille: Presses
Aix-Marseille, 1985) 129.
05For a strong expression of this idea at a time when legal sources in Quebec were at their most
confused see M. “Sur la ndcessit6 que les 6tudiants, les avocats et les juges connaissent l’histoire
du droit” (1846) 1 Rev. de 16g. et jurisp. 102.
106See, on this point, Andr6 Morel’s preface to Brisson’s thesis, supra, note 7 at 5-8. Indeed
Morel’s own work is perhaps the most eloquent expression of this sensitivity in the Quebec legal
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 35
of the American movement have pointed out.I” Furthermore, this brand of
scholarship permits social history to be pursued, if only by others, with assur-
ance. Brierley, Brisson and indeed the historian Desmond Brown, in accounting
for the history of a legislative process, demonstrate the usefulness of rigorous
internal legal history, for what the term is worth.
To my mind, the greatest failing of internal legal history is as much circum-
stantial as methodological. Even if one can respect the limits that method places
on this brand of research, the focus on lawyers’ concerns can distort the social
relevance of these concerns among lawyers themselves. Robert Gordon has
made this point plain in a review of the historical literature on codification
which, he suggests, may have created the nineteenth century codification
“movement” it purported to comment upon.’08 He argued forcefully that the
attention received by the codification now is inflated considering that codifica-
tion was designed largely as formal changes to lawyers’ internal rules and prac-
tices. The internal legal historians’ near-obsession with codification can only be
that of a lawyer: a social historian might bury in a footnote material to which
Brierley, Brisson and the present writer might devote pages. A cynic might say
that only someone with a stake in reinforcing the established order would invest
such energy in law reform that was more technical than social in its purpose. Yet
at the very least (or most), these accounts can give historical insight into cod-
ification which may prompt a better sense of what codification was, and is,
which I consider in the final section of this paper.
II. Given Codification, How is it Possible?
Beyond rising to the challenge of disproving the theory that two uncharted
parallel lines may indeed intersect, a comparative reading of the accounts of
these codifications provides the occasion to reflect on codification as a modem
legislative technique and on how historically contingent this legislative tech-
nique may in fact be.” Indeed it seems safe to assume that both Brown and
literature: see “La codification devant l’opinion publique de l’dpoque” in Boucher & Morel, supra,
note 29, vol. I, 27 and “L’apparition de la succession testamentaire [:] Rdflexions sur le r~le de la
jurisprudence au regard des codificateurs” (1966) 26 R. du B. 499 as examples of this brand of
Morel’s work treating the subject matter of the present paper.
0 In “Alexander Hamilton, Law Maker” (1978) 78 Colum. L. Rev. 483 at 483, J. Willard Hurst
1
noted that
Much of public policy belongs only to its own time. But some aspects of the past enters
into the present, and in light of such continuity we can more realistically identify and
judge the premises on which we use law.
108″Book Review” (1983) 36 Vand. L. Rev. 431, esp. at 437.
1″9A detailed account of the idea that what codification means depends on when you ask it is
found in J. Vanderlinden, Le concept de code en Europe occidentale du XIle au XIXe siecle [:]
Essai de difinition (Brussels: Universit6 Libre de Bruxelles, 1967). See also, J. Gilissen,
Introduction historique au droit (Brussels: Bruyant, 1979) at 408-25.
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
Brierley were encouraged to write their histories given the modem-day rele-
vance of codification. It can hardly be ignored that, first, both the Criminal
Code’10 and the Civil Code of Lower Canada”‘ were in force at the date of the
publication of these histories and that, second, both codes were the object of
resuscitation efforts by law reformers when Genesis”2 and “Civil Law
Codification!”” appeared. It seems appropriate to consider ‘what is’ codifica-
tion in part by asking ‘what was’ codification, as long as one is mindful of –
present-mindedness. Yet starting from the proposi-
or at least apologetic for –
tion that the mere existence of these two codifications proves that codification
is in fact possible as a legislative technique plainly begs more questions than it
answers. At the very least, one must define terms and describe the historical and
other contingencies upon which these definitions are premised.
A first and perhaps obvious point: ‘code’ means different things to differ-
ent lawyers. Both the Canadian criminal law” 4 and Quebec private law.. had
been called codes well before any legislature had given them that name. Over
the years all manner of statutes have been dubbed codes in Canada, both form-
ally and informally, and it seems fair to suspect that, at the very least,
1″For an overview of the legislative reform brought to the Criminal Code since its adoption in
response to what the author calls “[Pileas for a systematic and principled approach to reform of
the criminal law in Canada [which] are … almost as old as the Code itself” see P. Healy, “The
Process of Reform in Canadian Criminal Law” (1984) 42 U. T. Fac. L. Rev. 1.
“‘The Civil Code had been modified significantly since 1866 but retained the same essential
structure. For the full legislative history of the Code see Paul-A. Crpeau & J.E.C. Brierley, eds,
Code civil/Civil Code 1866-1980, Edition historique et critique/Historical and Critical Edition
(Montreal: SOQUU, 1981) and its Suppliment/Supplement 1980-1983 (1983).
” 2The publication of Brown’s book in 1990 occurs at a time when the Law Reform Commission
of Canada has undertaken a complete recodification project for substantive and procedural criminal
law: see L.R.C.C., Recodifying Criminal Law, supra, note 11 and Our Criminal Procedure: Report
32 (Ottawa: L.R.C.C., 1988). Brown alludes to this effort in his “Epilogue”, supra, note 1 at
149-164.
” 3The publication of Brierley’s article in 1968, supra, note 3 coincided with the work of the
Civil Code Revision Office, in which Brierley participated, which was charged by the Quebec gov-
ernment with the preparation of a Draft Civil Code: see Civil Code Revision Office, Report on the
Draft Civil Code, 3 vols. (Quebec City: tditeur officiel, 1978). The article was written in connec-
tion with the legal community’s observing of the centenary of the Civil Code: see . Boucher, J.E.C.
Brierley & A. Morel, Centenaire du Code civil- Centenary of Civil Code 1866-1966 Exposition
– Exhibition Catalogue (Montreal: Litho. Pierre Des Marais, 1966) [pamphlet].
114
1n the preface to his book which post-dated the 1869 consolidation of criminal law but pre-
ceded codification by some twenty years, S.R. Clarke wrote “there is one uniform Code of
Criminal Jurisprudence prevailing from the Atlantic to the Pacific”: A Treatise on Criminal Law
as Applicable to the Dominion of Canada (Toronto: R. Carswell, 1872) at v.
151n Fundamental Principles of the Laws of Canada, vol. 1, (Montreal, 1843) at 1, N.B. Doucet
used the expression “Civil Code” to describe a pre-codification amalgam of private law sources:
cited by Brierley, sup’a, note 3 at 535 n. 35. Indeed the Privy Council, which has on occasion been
criticized for its infelicitous use of the term, described the Coutume de Paris as a “code” in
Hutchison v. Gillespie, [1844] 1 A.C. 217.
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[Vol. 35
Quebeckers” 6 and non-Quebeckers” 7 use the term differently. If some
Quebeckers seem to use the term with considerable reverence,” 8 while others do
so with considerable licence,” 9 when all is said and done a code is, for the civil-
ian, “le module du droit”‘ and, for the Quebec jurist, an “instrument, 6rig6 en
symbole, de perception de droit”, to use Brisson’s elegant description of the
Civil Code of Lower Canada.’ But this multiplicity of codes makes for little
common ground.
It is nevertheless understandable that both Brown and Brierley be preoccu-
pied by the very essence of codification in their respective histories. Brown
begins his book with a theoretical effort to define codification. While no men-
tion is made in this opening chapter of the heady local precedent of 1866, in six
bold pages Brown reviews Benthamite thinking, considers the ‘codes’ of the
ancients, digs into English, French and German dictionaries and legal lexicons,
and looks to the French Code Napolion and the Code p6nal, the Institutes, the
German Biirgerliches Gesetzbuch and even the United States Code for guid-
ance. Brown concludes sensibly that any definition “that purports to be inclu-
sive of all past experience must be very general and unspecific, comprising only
the element that is common to the experience, namely, the systematization of an
existing body of law”.”2 The Criminal Code, 1892 is presented as a variation
on this theme: Brown quotes from Attorney General Sir John Thompson’s
address to the House of Commons in April of 1892 on second reading of the Bill
that it was “a reduction of law to an orderly written system, freed from needless
technicalities, obscurities and other defects … ….1′ I have added emphasis to
I
6Civil law scholar Robert Kouri has objected to the characterization of the Criminal Code as
an ordinary statute, choosing himself to describe it as a “vritable codification du droit rdpressif”
even if incomplete: “R~flexions sur les interventions chirurgicales et la d6fense de l’article 45 du
Code criminel” (1982) 12 R.D.U.S. 499 at 504-05.
l17Few Quebeckers would use the word as did criminal law reformer J.C. Martin in the following
sentence: “Although the British Parliament passed other Codes, e.g. the Partnership Act and the
Sale of Goods Act, it failed to pass a Criminal Code”: supra, note 74 at vi.
‘For a recent example in respect of recodification, see P. Legrand, jr, “Consolidation et rupture:
les ambiguit~s de la r6forme des contrats nomms” (1989) 30 C. de D. 867, esp. at 870-72, in
which the author objected to the form of the Loiportant riforme au Code civil du Quebec diu droit
des obligations, 1st Sess., 33rd Leg. Que., 1987, as “le triomphe du technocrate et de sa prose”.
119An example of an expansive use of the term by a Quebec jurist is Ferand Veilleux, Code
forestier (Duschenay, 1945), a pocket-sized volume written to “rendre service A l’homme qui vit
en for& ou que la for& fait vivre” (at v) and which, in addition to excerpts from legislation relating
to life in the woods, includes chapters entitled “Notions de Droit civil .. Droit commercial … Droit
criminel … Droit municipal” as well as notes on first-aid and good citizenship.
12Frangois Ewald, “Introduction” in Ewald, ed., La naissance diu Code civil (Paris: Gallimard,
1989) at 9, speaking of the Napoleonic Code. He continues, “le Code civil survit A ses propres
modifications; il a une existence propre, ind6pendante des lois qu’il contient” (at 10).
121Supra, note 7 at 17.
122Supra, note 1 at 11.
1231bid. at 10-11.
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
these quotations to signal that whatever codification means, the word ‘system’
is plainly central to Brown’s conception thereof.” And Brown is in good com-
pany. From the earliest scholarly evaluations of the Canadian Criminal Code”z
to more recent comments on codification and law reform,126 some notion of
‘systematization’ appears at the heart of the matter.
For Brierley, the dual preoccupation of ‘what is’ and ‘what was’ a code
was just as central to his account of the 1866 codification. This is not at all sur-
prising given that part of his purpose, in exposing the cahiers of the codifiers
100 years after the fact, was to “shed new light” on provisions of the 1866 Code
which remained in force. 27 He devoted considerable energy to discovering the
legal and technical considerations in the civil law codification, noting that –
at
the primary goal was “the organization and coordination of the
least in 1857 –
whole corpus of Lower Canada’s private law … in the simplified and readily
accessible form of a code”.”2s Codification has been viewed by Brierley 9 and
others ‘3 (as well as by the Commission which had undertaken –
and in some
the task’) as a legislative technique for achieving “system-
measure defined –
atization” of the law. Indeed this idea of ‘system’ is a recurring motif in
Brierley’s text as it was in Brown’s. What is the ‘system’ that is at the root of
codification?
124 The quest for what Brown calls the “systematization” of law is a dominant theme in the book
if one judges from the number of times he uses this term and its cousins in respect of law reform:
see, inter alia, ibid. at 5, 7, 11, 22, 24, 28, 32, 70, 84, 91, 102, 113, 120, 132, 145, 146, 148 (twice)
and 149.
125See John J. Power, The Criminal Law of Canada (Doctoral dissertation in law, Universit6
Laval, 1924). The Halifax lawyer who wrote this early thesis at a Quebec university described the
Code as an effort to “arrange the law of crime systematically” (at 1), placing it in the same tradition
as the Code of Hammurabi, the Code Napolgon, the Civil Code of Lower Canada, the Fitzjames
Stephen draft and David Dudley Field’s New York codes, among others.
t26Healy, supra, note 110 at 9 describes a “deductive” model for criminal law reform, in which
codification may partake, as “characteristically systematic and comprehensive”.
127Brierley, supra, note 3 at 524. Brierley the advocate was careful to signal to the reader that
the cahiers could not, however, constitute aids in any process of “strictly legal interpretation” (at
525).
islative formula for achieving a systematization of the law – was finally perfected”: Ibid.
’25Ibid. at 541.
129″The nineteenth century was the period when the technique of codification – merely one leg-
U3″The term springs up with striking regularity in other accounts of codification. See e.g.
Brisson, supra, note 7 at 17, who in his first sentence of his book on the codification of Quebec
civil procedure, describes the process as the “rorganisation complete et systmatique d’un ensem-
ble de r~gles juridiques”, and later, at 119, describes Cartier’s vision for sorting out the mass of
sources of Quebec law as a code, “un ouvrage unique, complet et systdmatiquement conqu ……
131In the Report tended with the draft Code to the Legislative Assembly of the Province of
Canada the Commissioners, the codifiers, noted that “[t]he compilation and digest in the form of
a code, of the entire body of our civil law, … constitutes a system …. : Civil Code of Lower
Canada. Sixth and Seventh Reports and Supplementary Report (Quebec: G. Desbarats, 1865) at
262 [emphasis added].
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 35
Attempts at defining codification are as many and varied as attempts at
codification and at least as complex. It may well be impossible to trace one idea
of ‘system’ to the various enactments commonly called codes.’ But the fact
that both the Criminal Code and the Civil Code have been perceived to consti-
tute ‘systems’ and that this continues to be a stated goal for their reform should
prompt an effort to sort out the constituent elements of the system in order to
clarify the meaning of codification. Two themes which are common to many
understandings of codification were expressed by J.C. Martin (a latter-day
Canadian criminal law codifier of sorts) who said that, in part, a code is a “com-
plete and co-ordinated body of law”.’33 I propose to canvass briefly these themes
of comprehensiveness and of co-ordinated style and organization over the fol-
lowing pages.
While common sense and a sense of history would suggest that law defies
this brand of comprehensive legislative expression, it is remarkable to observe
the number of codifiers and describers of codes who allude to this as a purpose
in codification. Indeed there is some evidence that comprehensiveness –
at
some level – was an objective in 186 6 M and, to a lesser extent, in 1892.1′
Conventional wisdom –
is that the
1892 codification did not result in a code at all. 37 The usual focus is on the abil-
ity of judges to create criminal law outside of the ambit of the Code which is
certainly conventional among lawyers”36 –
132The authors of the (Quebec) Private Law Dictionary (Montreal: Quebec Research Centre of
Private and Comparative Law, 1988) at 34 define “Code” in part as follows: “Body of fundamental
legislative provisions designed to present the different subject matter of an important branch of the
law in a systematic and coherent manner” [emphasis added]. The definition expressly extends to
“civil code” and “Civil Code of Lower Canada” but it is unclear whether it would apply to a doc-
ument such as the Criminal Code.
133Supra, note 74 at 3.
134n the last paragraph of their Reports submitted in 1864, Commissioners Caron, Day and
Morin advised the legislator to proceed carefully and soberly with amendments to the Code, so that
it might “gradually and surely become more and more complete”: supra, note 60 at 264.
135Brown, supra, note 1, describes, at 121ff. the considerable confusion in respect of this objec-
tive, and the manner in which the Code was almost given a true “general part” by Burbidge. In
the end, notes Brown at 126, the Code “did not purport to be exhaustive of the penal law, nor did
it contain a provision to abrogate the common law, as the English models had.”
136Brown, while not disagreeing with this lawyers’ nuance, took a broader view of this quest for
a written system of Canadian criminal law. In the abstract to his unpublished thesis on which the
book is based, Brown alluded to the criticism that the Criminal Code was not a “real code” and
noted that the “thesis of this dissertation is that Canada did indeed adopt a ‘real’ code which, since
it will soon be one hundred years old, has withstood the test of time”: supra, note 9 at vi. Part of
the challenge in reading Brown’s book is inferring, both from an historical and a contemporary per-
spective, just what a ‘real’ code actually is.
137This view does not seem to be time-bound: see, e.g., Taschereau’s attack in the months after
the Code’s adoption, supra, note 87 at 37; J.D. Cameron, “Codes and Codification” (1917) 37 Can.
L. Tunes 195; G. Crouse, “A Critique of Canadian Criminal Legislation” (1934) 12 Can. Bar Rev.
545, 601 at 566; and G. Parker, supra, note 15 at 247 who gives a thumbnail sketch of the issue
which he describes as “a matter of debate”.
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
therefore not comprehensive and it is thus not a true code. This argument is
invoked today as proof positive that the Criminal Code currently in force is no
In fact, one of the Law Reform
more a code than its 1892 predecessor.’
Commission of Canada’s four objectives for its new criminal code is “compre-
hensiveness”, presumably to make good the current state of affairs. 139 The pro-
posed code purports to include all substantive defences, “in the interest of com-
prehensiveness”, which flies in the face of the Anglo-Canadian idea that courts
should always be free to create defences as circumstances may require. The con-
ventional and rather sensible position of criminal law in the English tradition is
that courts should always retain a measure of control over the rule-making proc-
ess in respect of defences to assure that the statutory criminal law does not result
in the imprisonment of someone where that would be unjust. The principles of
fundamental justice which animate the criminal law, and which are now
entrenched in the Canadian constitutional law, thereby preclude a complete leg-
islative statement of the criminal law.14
Comprehensiveness as a goal sets up losing debates as to the ‘trueness’ of
codes, as much for private law as for criminal law. Perhaps the most telling
warning to be modest in this regard comes from the r~dacteurs of the French
Code of 1804. Portalis in his famous Discours prdliminaire given before the
Conseil D’Etat argued for his colleagues that it was naive to think that any code
could be complete:
Tout privoir, est un but qu’il est impossible d’atteindre. … Un Code, quelque com-
plet qu’il puisse paraitre, n’est Vas plut6t achev6 que milles questions inattendues
viennent s’offrir au magistrat.1
In an article published in 1989 which in large measure develops thinking
begun in “Civil Law Codification”, Brierley described different ways in which
the Civil Code of Lower Canada was and is inherently incomplete.’42 He went
back to the archival material that he had catalogued twenty years earlier to show
138When the Code was revised in 1954, a rule was added (now s. 9, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46) which
precluded the possibility of a person being convicted for an offence at common law, except for con-
tempt. This made the Code more comprehensive for offences, but judges remained and remain free
to invoke defences which are not provided for expressly in the Code. Thus it is argued that the
Code is not complete and is therefore not technically a code: see, e.g., Martin, supra, note 74 at
3; Law Reform Commission of Canada, supra, note 10 at 28.
1391bid. at 9.
140This is the necessary consequence of the interpretation given to s. 7 of the Canadian Charter
of Rights and Freedoms by Lamer J. (as he then was) in Reference Re: Motor Vehicle Act of B.C.,
[1985] 2 S.C.R. 486, 24 D.L.R. (4th) 536, 36 M.V.R. 240. The Law Reform Commission, ibid. at
28 acknowledges that constitutionally entrenched “principles of fundamental justice” will always
allow judges to develop other defences.
141The Discours prdliminaire is reproduced in Ewald, supra, note 120, 35 at 39, 41.
142 “Quebec’s ‘Common Laws’ (Droits Communs): How Many are There?” in E. Caparros, ed.,
supra, note 30, 111 at 114-20.
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[Vol. 35
that the Canada East codifiers themselves understood that the Code they were
drafting was to be necessarily incomplete as it was superimposed upon a droit
commun residing in implicit norms. He cited Charles Dewey Day’s injunction
that the laws of God, of Nature, of common sense, as well as custom and the
tenets of a universal legal education underlie and sustain all positive legislation:
Every Code of Laws however full & complete it may be necessarily pre-supposes
not only the existence but also the knowledge … of certain primary and fundamen-
tal principles.
43
Brierley extended his argument against the narrow view that true codifica-
tion is predicated on completeness by demonstrating that, in 1866, the Code was
intended only as a partial statement of Quebec law. Beyond the implicit norms,
the Code also left intact a droit commun residing in historical fact. Again
extending an argument that he traced twenty years earlier, he pointed to the
mass of historical sources that the codifiers expressly chose to leave in place,'”
specifically enumerated in Edouard Caron’s cahiers45 Unlike France, where
the 1804 Code is often described as a rupture with the past, Quebec codifiers
and code-watchers1″ cheerfully admit that the Civil Code of Lower Canada was
not and is not 47 a complete catalogue of private law. If the Code was and is a
‘system’, the essence of the system must reside elsewhere. Indeed one is
inclined to encourage both modem-day criminal law and Quebec private law
codifiers1″ to take note of the Portalis’ warning and curb in their avowed ambi-
tions to codify completely a body of law. The better view (and this might be
what some mean when they allude to completeness or comprehensiveness) is
143Day, “Cahier S.764” cited in Brierley, ibid. at 115 n. 7. Brierley cited this same passage in
1968 as evidence that the Code was “not conceived in a spirit of legal positivism”: supra, note 3
at 565.
144Art. 2712 C.C. [numbered 2613 in 1866] which states that the law in force in 1866 remains
so unless otherwise provided by the Code.
145The codifier’s notes were reproduced and annotated in Brierley, supra, note 3 at 547ff. The
sources Caron listed extended beyond the Coutume de Paris to include other elements of French
droit commun, English and French statutes, cases and doctrine, Roman law etc.
146See Mignault, supra, note 30 at 727, for whom the Code was “l’expression complete du vieux
droit”:
Je puis donc dire que notre Code civil 6nonce en substance ]a doctrine du vieux droit
coutumier, et je ne crois pas qu’il existe au monde de monument 16gislatif, pas meme
le Code Napolon, qui en contienne un expos6 aussi fidle.
‘For a recent affirmation of this idea see the notes of Chouinard J., in Lapierre v. A.G. Quebec,
[1985] 1 S.C.R. 241, 16 D.L.R. (4th) 554, 32 C.C.L.T. 233.
148See An Act to add the reformed law of persons, successions, and property to the Civil Code
of Qudbec, S.Q. 1987, c. 18 [not in force] which hints at an objective of comprehensiveness in a
Preliminary Provision to the Civil Code of Quebec: “The Civil Code comprises a body of rules
which in all matters within the letter, spirit or object of its provisions, lays down the droit comnmun,
expressly or by implication.” This statement and the idea of a droit commun residing in legislative
enactment is canvassed in Brierley, supra, note 142 at 120ff., esp. at 121 n. 25, 26.
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CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
that completeness is a unattainable objective, and that ‘systematizing’ must –
or should – mean something else.
So if the Civil Code of Lower Canada and the Criminal Code, 1892 were
and thereby codes –
not complete systems, were they nevertheless systems –
in another sense? To return to the hallmarks of a code cited by J.C. Martin ear-
lier, does the simple (or not so simple) ‘coordination’ of a given body of law
amount to codification? Others, such as French private lawyer Bruno Oppetit,
who link codification to systematization, have explained the latter concept in
part by identifying process-oriented objectives of codification to explain the
system. Oppetit noted that recent codifiers of French civil law, penal law and
procedure have cited themes of simplification, clarification, organization as well
as the “souci de rem~dier h l’excessif morcellement des sources du droit” to
explain their efforts.149 This sense of the “valeur g~n~rale du proc~d de la cod-
ification” 5′ may be instructive in coming to an understanding of the ‘systema-
tization’ which Brown and Brierley described in respect of their codes.
According to this view, systematization, as the hallmark of the legislative
technique, relates to the coherence of the legislative expression rather than its
completeness. A code is a system with an inner logic. And each code –
each
system – will have its own inner logic rooted in its organization and its style.
A successful code is, for Crrpeau, “un tout, organique et cohdrent”…
Codification is, according to this view, a process which seeks to achieve these
ends. Within a given subject-matter, within a given social and ideological
framework, the codifier creates this system within a single document.
The quest for stylistic and organizational unity may appear a modest one,
but as codifiers of different stripes have quickly learned, creating a ‘unified’
document is no mean feat. A uniform use of language is part of this mission,’52
and a measure of the success of a codification has often been its literary qual-
ity.’ This matter is made more complex for Quebec and Canadian codifiers by
149″L’exprrience frangaise de codification en matire commerciale” (1990) Rec. Dalloz 1 at 4.
15OIbid.
’51Crdpeau, supra, note 31 at XIV described the Civil Code of 1866 as having had this quality
upon its adoption, and as having lost it at its centenary, thereby needing reform. Brierley described
the way in which the Civil Code is perceived by civilians as “a certain perfection in the organi-
zation and style of legislative expression”: “The Civil Law System in Canada”, (Paper presented
at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of law librarians, Sherbrooke, Que., 1973)
[unpublished] at 39.
152See generally D. Klinck, “The Language of Codification” (1989) 14 Queen’s L.J. 33. For a
particularly critical view of the unwanted side-effects of poor codal and legislative drafting for
Quebec, see Adjutor Rivard, “De la technique legislative: 3i~me Rddaction” (1923) 1 Rev. du D.
442.
153 Frangois Grny analyzed the Code Napolion as an “oeuvre littdraire sui generis” in “La tech-
nique legislative dans Ia codification civile modeme” in Le Code civil 1804-1904 [:1 Livre du cen-
tenaire, supra, note 33, 991, esp. at 1003:
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 35
the challenge of legal bilingualism. An important part of the purpose of the 1866
codification was, according to Cartier, rendering the private law of Lower
Canada fully accessible to both English and French-speaking jurists,” and the
quality of the 1866 translation is one of its greatest and most enduring suc-
cesses. 5 The translation of the 1892 Criminal Code into French is largely an
untold story. Brown makes little mention of this remarkably important, difficult
and poorly executed part of the codification enterprise. It was important, as
Andr6 Morel has argued, because it was the French text that would promote
what Morel has called the “enracinement” of the English criminal law in
Quebec.’56 It was difficult in that Anglo-Canadian criminal law has a very close
relationship with the English language: so close, in fact, that it is arguable that
the French-language expression of Canadian criminal law is normatively dis-
tinct from the English language version originale.’57 Finally, the poor execution
of the 1892 translation is evident in the very titles of the two Codes.’58
In a similar way, a measure of the success of a code is often the coherence
of its organization. Both the Civil Code of Lower Canada and the Criminal
Code, 1892 were enactments drafted to include tables of contents, which was
unusual for legislative drafting at the time each of these laws were adopted.
Many claim, particularly in respect of the Civil Code, that part of the inner logic
of the ‘system’ is in the plan.’59 It is often this aspect of the system that critics
fix upon when insisting that a code needs to be revised. Bruno Oppetit has
described two legislative phenomena which contribute to codal systems falling
apart: he notes the dicodification and instrumentalisme juridique which have
afflicted the French Code de commerce and which threaten to destroy the very
… on peut drcouvrir, sous les formules aisres, nettes et sans pretention, de notre cod-
ification civile, une sorte de technique inconsciente, pr~parde de longue main par les
coutumes rrdig~es, les travaux de nos anciens auteurs, surtout les ordonnances royales,
et plus directement par les lois rrvolutionnaires, vraiment nouvelle nranmoins en la
frappe drfinitive dont a su la marquer le clair de la genie de la France modeme […].
15’Brierley, supra, note 3 at 535ff.
155While it would be naive to consider the two texts as normative equivalents, the better view
is that the codification process itself made neither version more authoritative than the other. As
Brierley demonstrated on the basis of the codifiers cahiers, ibid. at 537, first drafts of the Code
may have been in French or in English, but final versions reflected as best as possible the codifiers’
preoccupation with generating equivalent texts.
’56Morel, supra, note 7.
’57This argument is developed in Kasirer, supra, note 25.
158The complete title of the Criminal Code, 1892, 55-56 Vict., c. 29 was “An Act respecting the
Criminal Law” in English and “Acte concemant ]a loi criminelle” in French. The current title in
French has substituted “droit” for “loi”.
159See Marcel Planiol, “Inutilit6 d’une r6vision g6nrrale du Code civil” in Le Code civil
1804-1904 [:1 Livre diu centenaire, supra, note 30, 957 for a strongly-worded plea against amend-
ing the plan of the Code Napolion.
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
coherence of the plan which made it a code in the first place.”6 Indeed it is a
matter of considerable debate among Quebec jurists as to what topics deserve
a place in the Code’ and in what detail they may be so deserving.’ 62
Is organizational and stylistic ‘systematization’ any more attainable than
comprehensiveness as an objective for codification? The Civil Code, given its
ambitious scope, cannot hope to conform to a single organizational or stylistic
genre throughout. The chapter of the Book of Obligations treating offences and
quasi-offences, which in 1866 had only four articles, is cast very differently
from the rules on the extinction of obligations found in the same Book. What
allows the two chapters to be part of one unified system is something far more
subtle than equivalent organization and style. The same might be said of the
Criminal Code, where strikingly different drafting styles and organization were
necessary to accommodate rules on murder and rules on courts’ jurisdiction
within the same ‘system’. Today, each code contains ‘codes-within-codes’,
impinging on the system further still. 6
But while those promoting codes as ‘systems’ often argue that organiza-
tional unity is at the core of what makes a code a code, they often fail to explain
what thefil conducteur of that unity is. Rather than finding codal integrity in its
uniform style or formal organization, one might focus on the mission of those
charged with codification as the clearest defining feature of the system. A civil
code has an inner logic rooted in its objective of setting a framework for the reg-
ulation of women and men as private persons in civil society. As Brierley has
said, the Quebec Civil Code has the status of “common law” in that “[i]t defines
and sets out – it constitutes – the most fundamental categories and concepts that
provide the cadre of Quebec legal thought in one of its main branches, the pri-
vate law”. 6″ This mission shapes the document and, most probably, renders
comparison with the Criminal Code, with its different mission, difficult.
Given the frustrations of discovering the key to the systematization of the
codes, it is tempting indeed to conclude that codification is an ad hoc, task-
16Supra, note 149 at 3, which phenomena he explains as “‘utilisation des r~gles de droit comme
simple moyen d’action au service de telle ou telle fmalit circonstantielle, au d6triment de la sta-
bilit6, de la continuit6 et de la coherence des concepts juridiques”.
161See the controversial position argued for by Pierre-Gabriel Jobin to the effect that consumer
protection rules belong in a renewed Quebec civil code: “Prospective g~n~rale” (1989) 30 C. de
D. 557 at 562.
162The proposed draft bill on the law of obligations directs that its provisions may be completed
by regulations in some instances, which is, for Jobin, “assez loin de l’id~al napol6onien, … qui fit
jadis le n6tre, d’un petit code dans lequel chacun pourrait trouver les pr6ceptes utiles pour r~gler
tous les diff~rends entre individus”: “Chronique de droit civil qu~b~cois” (1990) R.T.D.C. 841 at
846.
163The rules on the interception of communications at ss. 184ff. of the Criminal Code and the
rules on condominiums at arts 441bff. of the Civil Code are two possible examples.
164Supra, note 142 at 122-23.
REVUE DE DROIT DE McGILL
[Vol. 35
oriented technique which defies description, let alone the charting of a road map
for its modus operandi. That there are no universal truths in codification would
also satisfy the legal purist inclined to point up the significant differences inher-
ent to the disciplines of civil and criminal law which limit the commonality
between the two codal ‘systems’. It is of course true that the whole of criminal
law is tempered by concepts such as the principle of legality, the presumption
of innocence and the presumption in favour of liberty that affect not just the
interpretation of the criminal law, but also its very formulation. The need for
techniques to curb the immense clout of the law-enacting, law-enforcing state
power in criminal matters where physical liberty is at issue is a real difference
between the two ‘systems’.” 5 On the other hand, “le droit civil est avant tout un
style”, “’66 as Pierre-Gabriel Jobin recalled recently in a review of the Quebec
government’s re-codification project, and it may be that this style, and the mis-
sion associated with it, is so peculiar that it precludes full comparison with
norms originating in other ‘systems’ where drafting styles and legislative mis-
sions are different.
What then remains at the core of these ‘systematizations’? Very little, it
would seem: as Frangois Terr6 said some thirty years ago, “la notion de code
a perdu sa nettet6″.” Comprehensiveness is universally absent to differing
degrees. Drafting styles are wildly disparate. Codes can aspire to coherence but
they seems always to fall shy. And finally, codes are made special by their polit-
ical, legislative and ideological missions. There seems little hope, at least in
respect of any of these benchmarks, for finding any unity in codification. About
the only sure thing that codes seem to have in common –
in particular the two
compared here –
is that they are more durable than ordinary statutes.
It may be that the Civil Code of Lower Canada and the Criminal Code
have managed to survive, as amended, on the statute books for reasons other
than whatever strength they may draw from their shape. On the occasion of the
centenary of the Quebec Code, Maximilien Caron described what he called the
physiognomy of the document that had so dominated Quebec legal thinking in
the following terms: “Trois tendances se ddgagent nettement, que l’on retrouve
en filigrane, dans le Code de 1866: individualiste, autocratique et religieuse.’65
It may be that these three themes of the Code meant that it was, at its inception
and for many years thereafter, a politically flexible document, able to accommo-
165Portalis raised this in his Discours, supra, note 119 at 44. For a modem expression by a civil-
ian see Jean-Louis Baudouin, “Quelques rtflexions sur le droit civil et le droit criminel: oit sont
les diffdrences relles?” in P. Fitzgerald, ed., supra, note 75, 23 at 25.
166Supra, note 162 at 846. Jobin finds the style, to which the late Rena David referred, largely
absent from the Quebec draft bill on the law of obligations.
167Supra, note 32 at 175.
168″De la physionomie, de l’6volution et de l’avenir du Code civil” in Morel & Boucher, supra,
note 29, vol. I, 3 at 10.
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CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
date these same three influences on private law relations within Quebec soci-
ety. 69 The individualist Code has allowed the document to keep step with the
Quebec free-market economy. The autocratic Code has simultaneously reflected
the patriarchal Quebec family reality. The religious Code has, again at the same
time, allowed for a special place for the church in the rules respecting marriage.
The Code has remained relevant (and in force) because it is several codes, or
one code with a plurality of systems working within it. The Civil Code is a pri-
vate law constitution with something for everyone, it is a living tree, a pluralist
document of compromise. This is as much its inner secret as its inner logic.
It is difficult to know if a similar analysis can be brought to bear on the
Criminal Code to explain its (until recently) safe place in the Revised Statutes
of Canada. Ironically, in spite of its reputed incoherence, it is more philosoph-
ically homogeneous then the Civil Code. An individualist approach to culpabil-
ity based on subjective moral blameworthiness was and is the cardinal philo-
sophical feature of Parliament’s hundred year-old Code, and for some, this is its
system-defining quality 70 Looking to the themes embedded in the Criminal
Code in 1892 as a means of explaining its longevity is an important avenue for
further research.
In light of the failure to describe an universal experience in codification,
it is perhaps surprising to see from the language used by modem-day codifiers
to describe their work that codification in criminal law and civil law is proceed-
ing along comparable ground, or at least grounds deserving of comparison. In
England, where criminal law codification still raises considerable scepticism,
the Law Commission report on the current effort separates the substance of the
law to be reformed from the technique:
Codification, as the Criminal Code team points out, is a process which differs from
law reform. It is essentially a task of restating the law in a single coherent, con-
sistent, unified and comprehensive piece of legislation. 171
There is at least a common expression in respect of the objectives of this effort
to “systematise”‘”I when compared to codifications of private law, past and
169R.A. Macdonald hints at this in his description of the underlying philosophies of the Code in
“Civil Code”, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2d ed., vol. I (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1988) 429.
170See the notes of Laskin CJ. in The Queen v. Prue, [1979] 2 S.C.R. 547 at 553, 8 C.R. (3d)
68, 46 C.C.C. (2d) 257, in which it is said that the mere inclusion of an offence in the Code imports
mens rea because “The Criminal Code is a code of outright prohibitions distinguishable from reg-
ulatory offences created by other kinds of federal legislation”.
171The Law Commission (Law Com. No. 143), Codification of the Criminal Law (London:
H.M.S.O., 1985) at 6-7. These objectives were restated in the plea for codification in the Law
Commission’s subsequent report (Law Com. No. 177), A Criminal Code for England and Wales,
vol. 1 (London: H.M.S.O., 1989) at 5-11.
172This is the term used to describe the process by one of England’s best known criminal law-
yers, who remains sceptical of the technique: Brian Hogan, “Some Reservations on Law Reform”
in Fitzgerald, ed., supra, note 75, 65.
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 35
present. And for those who remain sanguine about the benefits of a systematic
treatment of the law in a codified form, a comparison between the Quebec expe-
rience and the national criminal law project may be useful. This was the view
expressed by one of the most prolific civil law scholars of the current genera-
tion, Jean-Louis Baudouin, in a liber amicorum for criminal law reformer
Jacques Fortin. Baudouin argued forcefully in favour of a “vritable” criminal
code for Canada which would reorganize the law in a more rational manner
along the lines of the codification he knew best:
I faut avouer que pour quelqu’un habitu6 A se servir d’un Code civil, le Code cri-
minel canadien est un peu rebutant. … Notre Code criminel actuel, malgr6 ses ver-
tus, reste plus une jungle ou au moins un jardin At demi-d6frich qu’un ordonnan-
cement logique. 173
It seems that, within important limits, codifiers might learn from each others’
mistakes and successes.
Conclusion
There are many good and sensible reasons to shy away from drawing par-
allels between the 1866 codification of Quebec private law and the Criminal
Code, 1892. There are the important differences in the disciplines: the very
tenor of legislative drafting in criminal law is affected by the fact that a person’s
physical liberty is at stake whereas nothing of the sort can be said of private law
codes. There is the difference in legal traditions: the dominant style of the civil
law which finds expression in the Civil Code of Lower Canada extends beyond
grammar and syntax to go to the very roots of the ideas which take shape as
rules therein. Finally, any effort to infer the ‘universal’ truths of codification,
when based on readings of codes adopted at different times in different political
communities, is necessarily ahistorical. Indeed perhaps the most important crit-
icism one can levy against the arguments found in this paper is that I have
imposed a 1990 parallel on two disconnected moments in nineteenth century
law reform.
Yet even if one allows for (or perhaps ignores) these problems, the temp-
tation to trace the boundaries of the common ground is too tempting. The dif-
ferences in the disciplines have not stopped others, including notable figures in
the American codification movement such as David Dudley Fields, from con-
templating private law and public law codifications at the same time.’74 The
173Baudouin, supra, note 157 at 25. Baudouin, who is now an appellate court judge wrestling
with both codes at once, was quick to note the differences between the two ‘systems’ in this paper.
174The connection did not always serve to promote codification. An English scholar recently tur-
ned up evidence that one of the most vociferous opponents to the Fitzjames Stephen’s draft crim-
inal law code was moved to oppose the bill because he thought it would jeopardize the chances
of codifying private law: see S. White, “Lord Chief Justice Cockburn’s Letters on the Criminal
Code Bill of 1879” [1990] Crim. L. R. 315.
1990]
CANADA’S CRIMINAL LAW CODIFICATION
similarity in the way in which the civil law and the criminal law codifiers
framed and frame their objectives encourages the view that there may be some
(as yet uncharted) universality in the two enterprises. Finally, the twenty-six
years which separated the two legislative reforms might not be a bar to an ‘his-
toricized’ comparison when one considers that the same brand of elite lawyer
was involved in both projects. A striking connection between 1866 and 1892 is
the crossing of paths of two of the prime movers in the two stories in the period
entre deux codes. Coincidence would have it that John A. Macdonald named
both Charles Dewey Day and James Robert Gowan to the Royal Commission
charged with the investigation of the 1873 Pacific Railway scandal. Day had
devoted the best part of his energies between 1859 and 1865 thinking about pri-
vate law codification. Gowan, by that time already established as Ottawa’s pre-
mier criminal law draftsman, would work on and off for the succeeding twenty
years towards codifying Canadian criminal law. Did Gowan discuss the ‘syste-
matization’ of law with his codifier-colleague during the less agitated moments
of the Commission’s work?
And just as the two codifications appearing at a twenty-odd year interval
bear comparison, so do the accounts by J.E.C. Brierley and Desmond Brown,
separated, coincidentally, by about the same period of time. In somewhat differ-
ent shapes, both these accounts contain a plea for a careful history of legislation
and for the merits what some have too quickly denounced as “internal legal his-
tory”. And, coincidentally, both end with thoughts on the lessons of their histo-
ries for on-going law reform through codification. The last line of Brown’s
Epilogue sounds a pessimistic note for the Law Reform Commission’s current
recodification project, citing “historical legislative experience, from [Francis]
Bacon’s to [Sir John] Thompson’s …..
Brierley also ends his history with
advice for modem-day codifiers, then (and today) hard at work at reforming the
Civil Code of Lower Canada. In the last line of his essay, he turns a quotation
from Portalis’ Discours to a modem-day use: “The reform of Quebec’s Code
must amount to more than an effort to find new ways to instill a love for old
laws”. “’76 The accounts of codification by Brown and Brierley suggest that there
are parallels in the history and the historiography of codification that, when
fully recognized, might further an understanding of what it meant to codify law
in nineteenth century Canada and to codify law today. In a sense, the work of
Brown and Brierley show us that there may in fact be old ways to instill love
for new laws, to stretch (ahistorically) Portalis’ idea from 24 thermidor an 8 to
the present.
175Supra, note 1 at 164.
176Brierley, supra, note 3 at 574. The allusion is to Portalis’ explanation of the limited vocation
of the 1804 French codification: “…au lieu de changer des lois, il est presque toujours plus utile
de prsenter aux citoyens de nouveaux motifs de les aimer”, supra, note 120 at 39. This was, of
course, the guiding principle for Quebec’s civil law codification of 1866.
