From: ce11son@yahoo.ca

On Wed, 13 Aug 2014 02:33:11 +0000 (UTC), John Levine 
wrote:

>>>As has been outlined in that newspaper report, the next step in the
>>>process is the court appearance in September.  Follow it, and
>>>appreciate that Canada's legal system is not American.
>>
>>State courts in the United States uses a legal system based on the English
>>legal system. What's Canada's based on, Somalia's? I found a Web page
>>of a criminal attorney in Toronto that refers to preliminary hearings,
>>but for all I know, Quebec has exceptional procedures.
>
>Quebec law is based on pre-Napoleonic French law, but the criminal
>procedures seem to be mostly harmonized with the rest of Canada.  The
>Canadian legal system only separated from the British
>
English!
but it was never part of the English system, rather than adopting
Common Law on the English model progressively from the late 18th
century
(says http://www.gregmonforton.com/origin-of-canadian-law.html ).
It would IMU have effectively gone its own way consequential to the
British North America Act 1867 before which time statute law would
have originated from the Westminster parliament. Being a Common Law
system means it borrows (and gets borrowed from) when necessary from
other such jurisdictions when no appropriate local source is available
so judgements can have references from various parts of the world near
and far. This borrowing also results in non-domestic influence on
domestic statutes giving you e.g. "Culpable homicide" in the CAN
Criminal Code dealing with defining criminal homicide, the phrase
originating from Scots Law rather than English Law (although in Canada
it describes the whole group of criminal homicide offences rather than
the narrower Scottish offence of criminal homicide not amounting to
murder).
The "borrowing" across Common Law systems seemed to be fairly well
demonstrated a few years ago in an English civil case involving
someone who killed himself in police custody, the reference sources
for the final appeal coming from a "world tour" of Common Law systems
in various Commonwealth countries and the US; some of those sources
IIRC themselves involved earlier borrowing from other jurisdictions.

>in the 20th
>century, so there really are significant differences from US practice.
>As a trivial example, lawyers still wear wigs and robes in court.
>(I've seen them.)
>
>There will indeed be a preliminary hearing.  That's what will happen
>in September.  This web site gives a useful overview of Quebec
>criminal procedure:
>
>http://www.educaloi.qc.ca/en/capsules/criminal-and-penal-cases-
ourt-quebec-procedure

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