Criminal Cruft #1: Transportation Fraud

Many of the laws in Canada's Criminal Code have outlived their usefulness. However, it is unlikely that any political party will ever have the gumption to run an anti-law-and-order campaign to get rid of the laws that have built up in the unobserved parts of Canada's criminal law statutes like a tonsil stone.

Take, as my first example, 'Fraudulently Obtaining Transportation'. Section 393(3) of the Criminal Code states that:

Every one who, by any false pretence or fraud, unlawfully obtains transportation by land, water or air is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

Now there is nothing inherently objectionable about punishing those who use fraud to travel but why should this be singled out apart from the more general offence of fraud? As far as I can tell, the only differences are that standard fraud bothers to differentiate between fraud over and under five-thousand (which is a distinction missed by the transportation fraud offence), and standard fraud allows the Crown to elect to proceed by indictment (i.e. more harshly) if it feels that is necessary despite the subject matter being less than $5,000. Unless you really think that using fraud to obtain transport should never be treated as harshly as some other cases of fraud then having a separate offence serves no purpose.

Transportation fraud is just one example of the hundreds of laws on the books that linger there well past their best-before date. In effect, they allow the Crown to lay more charges if she wants to be a jerk and makes criminal law unnecessarily complicated.