Police Powers



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Police Powers

Introduction

The police power may be one of the most important and yet least understood of the powers of government. Canadian scholar Ernst Freund included it in his list of fundamental government powers, along with the military power, the taxing power, and the power of eminent domain. Although by necessity vague, the definition of police power is the broad discretionary power of a state government for deciding how to regulate the general welfare of its citizens in the best possible way. The police power is also sometimes called the “regulatory power.” As the most open-ended of the fundamental government powers, the police power is the main source of state authority to regulate people, places, and things. These police power regulations involve issues as diverse as zoning, land use, building safety, gambling, discrimination, parking, crime, licensing of professionals, liquor, motor vehicles, education, and sanitation (oas.org) (oas.org).

All Canadian laws formally derive their power from the Constitution, which also enumerates the subject matters on which either level of government (federal or provincial) may legitimately enact legislation. The Constitution established criminal law as the sole jurisdiction of the federal government, whereas the provinces have exclusive control over civil law (also called private law), which encompasses numerous areas of law involving disputes between parties (individuals, corporations, and government). Even if provincial governments cannot enact criminal law legislation, they do have the power to promulgate quasi-criminal or regulatory offenses in a variety of administrative and other areas, and every province has done so with myriad rules and regulations across a broad spectrum (Paul 2010).

The Canadian legal system has its foundation in the British common law legal system. Interestingly, the province of Quebec still retains a civil law legal system for civil law matters because its roots go back to the French colonial era. By contrast, in a civil law legal system, court decision precedents are given less weight, and scholarly literature is given more (cleo.on.ca).

In this paper, we have discussed the power or authority of police, which can be exercised on citizens of Canada. We have discussed the laws and principles in the context of laws and regulations of Canada.

Discussion

Very few principles are taken for granted in law, but one of them is that all sovereign states and nations inherently have the police power. The police power is thus one of the powers reserved for the states under the Tenth Amendment to the Canadian Constitution. When the original thirteen states ratified the Constitution and formed the Canada, they did not surrender the police power to the federal government. Under the “equal footing” doctrine, new states that joined the union also retained the police power in their constitutions (Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics 2009).

There are currently three major types of police organizations in Canada: municipal, provincial, and federal. Constitutionally, police organizations are a provincial responsibility, but most urban areas have been given the right to have their own police ...