Legal Brief for October, 2012

Statute Law

In the Legal Brief for September we looked at the use of precedent cases in our legal system.  In doing so I commented on the two sources for laws in our system - the first being from laws passed by our governments (known as statute law) and the second from previously decided cases from our courts (known as common law).  We will take a closer look at how statute law is developed in this Brief, and we will turn to common law in the November Brief.

A "statute" is a term that is used to denote a law passed by a governmental body.  Like many words in English, statute is derived from a Latin word, in this case statuere, which means "to make stand or set up".  In Canada statute law comes either from the federal level of our governmental system, being of course the Government of Canada, which enacts laws that are national in scope, or from the provincial governments, in our case the Province of Alberta.  Municipalities also have the power to enact legal rules, although they are not known as statutues but rather as by-laws.

In Canada proposed statutes must be introduced into the appropriate legislative body by a member of that body.  The proposed statutes are known as "bills" until they are passed into law.  The bills can be officially introduced by the governing party, or by a member of either the government or of one of the opposition parties on their own, in which case they are known as a "private member's bill".  Bills may be developed as a result of a government initiative to deal with a particular problem in society, or they may be developed from pressure put on the government by interest groups or lobbyists seeking to have something dealt with that has been unregulated.

Once a bill is introduced into the legislature it must go through a series of "readings" - commonly known as 1st, 2nd and 3rd reading.  This process allows the members of the legislature to debate the contents of the bill, and to propose amendments if desired.  Once the bill has passed 3rd reading it must then receive what is known as "royal assent" from the representative of Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II, which at the federal level is from the office of the Governor General (after the bill has also been passed by the Senate) and at the provincial level is from the office of the Lieutenant Governor.

The practice of royal assent developed during the reign of Henry VI, when the practice of introducing bills in the House of Commons in the form of petitions was replaced by bills in the form of complete statutes.  The King would then attend at Parliament and provide his consent to the statute in person.  As an interesting historical footnote, the process of royal assent was changed to an administrative procedure during the reign of Henry VIII, in order to spare King Henry the indignity of having to make a personal appearance in the House of Commons to assent to the Bill of Attainder, which sanctioned the execution of his 5th wife, Catherine Howard.

Once a bill has received royal assent, there is still one more step that must be followed before it becomes a law of the land.  This final step for the statute to be "proclaimed in force".  This is a date set by the government as the date on which the law is to actually take effect.  It can be a case of being proclaimed in force immediately on the bill receiving royal assent, or for a few months into the future or sometimes up to a couple of years away.  The proclamation date is sometimes contained in the bill itself, so that people will know in advance when it is to take effect or the date may be left undetermined and will be announced by the government when it feels it is an appropriate time for the law to take effect.  The use of a proclamation date is to allow people a grace period to become aware of a law before it actually starts to be enforced.