Courts of Canada

The court system of Canada forms the judicial branch of government, formally known as "the Queen on the Bench", which interprets the law and is made up of many courts differing in levels of legal superiority and separated by jurisdiction. Some of the courts are federal in nature while others are provincial or territorial.

The Canadian constitution gives the federal government the exclusive right to legislate criminal law while the provinces have exclusive control over civil law. The provinces have jurisdiction over the administration of justice in their territory. Almost all cases, whether criminal or civil, start in provincial courts and may be eventually appealed to higher level courts. The quite small system of federal courts only hears cases concerned with matters which are under exclusive federal control, such as federal taxation, federal administrative agencies, intellectual property, some portions of competition law and certain aspects of national security. The federal government appoints and pays for both the judges of the federal courts and the judges of the superior and appellate level courts of each province. The provincial governments are responsible for appointing judges of the lower provincial courts. Provincial administrative tribunals also comprise part of provincial courts. This intricate interweaving of federal and provincial powers is typical of the Canadian constitution.

Very generally speaking, Canada's court system is a four-level hierarchy as shown below from highest to lowest in terms of legal authority. Each court is bound by the rulings of the courts above them; however, they are not bound by the rulings of other courts at the same level in the hierarchy. Civil courts in Quebec, in particular, are under no obligation to apply judicial precedent—the principle of stare decisis—which is the general rule elsewhere in Canada. This is because Quebec's civil law is entirely codified, while civil law in the other nine provinces grew out of the English common law.

There are two terms used in describing the Canadian court structure which can be confusing, and clear definitions are useful at the outset.

The first is the term "provincial court," which has two quite different meanings, depending on context. The first, and most general meaning, is that a provincial court is a court established by the Legislature of a province, under its constitutional authority over the Administration of Justice in the Province, set out in s. 92(14) of the Constitution Act, 1867. This head of power gives the Provinces the power to regulate "... the Constitution, Maintenance, and Organization of Provincial Courts, both of Civil and of Criminal Jurisdiction, and including Procedure in Civil Matters in those Courts." All courts created by a Province, from the small claims court or municipal by-law court, up to the provincial Court of Appeal, are "provincial courts" in this general sense.

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