Are you a good witch, or a bad witch? Until recently, Canadian law only cared if you were faking your witchery.
It's not too uncommon to come across some legacy law that prohibits the practice of witchcraft. These laws tend to be written during witch panics and are simply left on the books for no other reason than it's easier to ignore than repeal them.
However, recently I discovered a Canadian law that prohibit's the practice of fake witchcraft. You read that right. Up until very recently (2018), pretending to do any kind of voodoo was a criminal offense.
Here is the text of the law:
Pretending to practise witchcraft, etc.
365 Every one who fraudulently
(a) pretends to exercise or to use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration,
(b) undertakes, for a consideration, to tell fortunes, or
(c) pretends from his skill in or knowledge of an occult or crafty science to discover where or in what manner anything that is supposed to have been stolen or lost may be found,is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
Even though it's obviously aimed at scam artists, as such it's a very badly written law overall
The best language in the law is part (b). It doesn't prohibit fortune telling, it prohibits professional fortune telling -- the kind where money changes hands. According to that text, you can still do it for fun.
However, part (c) doesn't make that exception. Dowsing for fun -- or just for the hell of it -- is just as illegal as charging an arm or leg for it. It remains illegal if you pick up a stick and pretend to dowse because you find it funny. Before 2018, Canada simply didn't tolerate dowsing of any kind, for any reason.
Part (a) is much more interesting than the other two, as it prohibits pretending to do anything witchy whatsoever. It's so inclusive that (b) and (c) are completely redundant. One would think that no further clarification would be needed, but apparently the Canadian government thought that some potential loopholes existed in (a) and thus added (b) and (c) to close them.
(a) is so generic that it bans a stage magician from doing the cliche bit about getting his magic secrets from a mystic in some oriental land. In fact, it criminalizes the entire act of any magician who delivers this patter.
If this law was still be taken seriously over the last decade, part (a) would have applied to kids pretending to cast spells with their Harry Potter TM brand fake wands. Can you imagine that?
Cop: PUT DOWN THE WAND, KID!
Kid: Expelliarmus!
Cop: You gone dun it now! You're going to jail!
What I find most entertaining about is this law is it's absolute impracticality and what it implicitly states.
In a round about way, this law could be used as an argument that the Canadian government accepts the existence of the power of real witchcraft. By explicitly stating that you can fake doing witchy things, it also implies the inverse: that it's possible to do real witchy things.
This begs the question: how would an officer of the law prove that the person doing the witchy thing is pretending? I can only imagine this going something like this:
Cop: PUT DOWN THE WAND, KID!
Kid: Expelliarmus!
:: Cop tackles, handcuffs kid, puts him in the back of his car. ::
Cop (speaking to radio): I need another officer at the pond. A kid just pointed a wand at me so we gotta throw him in and see if he floats.
Stay frosty. :)
