The Canada Jurisdiction Act (1803) and the North-West

From the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Third Series, Section II, Volume XXXII. Arthur S. Morton was a professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan as well as the University’s Librarian. In this article, he discusses the hazy geographic and legal boundaries of the 1803 Canada Jurisdiction Act, which extended the authority of courts in Upper and Lower Canada to situations where no other court’s authority applied. Morton begins by sketching several crimes occurring in the North-West in the late 1700s and early 1800s that precipitated the Act’s creation. He then examines instances where the North West Company and Hudson’s Bay Company creatively leveraged the Act in their battles against one another for fur monopolies. With reference to specific crimes and cases, Morton explores the difficulty of establishing legal authority in the North-West in the early 1800s. An offprint.