Duelling Was a Crime in Canada Until 2018: The Law, and the Last Fatal Duel Near Perth, Ontario

Written by: Sara Santos-Vigneault

Date: August 17, 2026

Until December 2018, it was a criminal offence in Canada to challenge someone to a duel. Not to fight one, to challenge one. Simply provoking, or agreeing to answer, a challenge could send a person to prison for up to two years.[1]

The law traced back to a very specific piece of Canadian history: a pistol duel fought outside Perth, Ontario, in 1833, the last one in the country's history to end in a death.

What Section 71 Actually Said

Former section 71 of the Criminal Code made it an indictable offence to challenge or attempt to provoke another person to fight a duel, to attempt to provoke someone to challenge a third party to a duel, or to accept a challenge to fight one. Conviction carried a maximum sentence of two years.[1]

The offence did not require an actual duel to take place. The mere act of issuing or accepting a challenge was enough to satisfy the law, regardless of whether pistols were ever raised.

The Last Fatal Duel in Canada

The provision existed on paper for well over a century, but Canada's last known duel-related death happened decades before the modern Criminal Code was even written.

On June 13, 1833, two young law students in Perth, Upper Canada, John Wilson and Robert Lyon, fought a pistol duel over remarks Lyon had made about a local schoolteacher, Elizabeth Hughes.[2] The dispute began after Wilson overheard Lyon disparage Hughes at a tavern in Bytown, reported the comment in a letter, and word got back to Lyon. The two later clashed at the Perth courthouse, where Lyon struck Wilson. Wilson responded by challenging Lyon to a duel.[3]

The two men met at dawn on the bank of the Tay River, just outside town. Lyon's second, a former army officer named Henry Le Lievre, is generally described by historians as having pushed the dispute toward violence rather than toward reconciliation.[4] The first exchange of shots missed. On the second, Lyon was struck and died on the spot.

Le Lievre fled the country. Wilson turned himself in to authorities and was charged with murder, tried at the assizes in Brockville, and acquitted.[2][5]

The acquittal was significant for reasons beyond the individual case. Duelling occupied an unusual legal position in the nineteenth century: formally illegal, but often tolerated as a matter of honour among the educated classes, and juries in that era were frequently reluctant to convict participants, particularly when the survivor had followed the accepted code of conduct for a duel. Wilson's acquittal fit that pattern. He went on to be called to the bar in 1835, married Elizabeth Hughes, and later served as both a member of Parliament and a judge, a trajectory that would be almost unthinkable for an acquitted killer today, and that says as much about the period's attitude toward duelling as any statute did.[2][6]

No fatal duel is known to have occurred in Canada since.

Why the Law Survived So Long

Section 71 and its predecessors remained on the books for well over a century after anyone was last prosecuted under them, in large part because Parliament rarely revisits Criminal Code provisions once the conduct they address has effectively disappeared. Canada inherited its duelling prohibition from English law, and the offence was carried into Canada's first consolidated Criminal Code in 1892 and, with only minor wording changes, into every revision since.[7]

By the twenty-first century, section 71 sat alongside a handful of other provisions widely regarded as relics: a ban on fraudulently pretending to practise witchcraft, restrictions on "crime comics," and an offence for advertising a reward for stolen property with a promise that no questions would be asked.[8][9] None of these saw meaningful enforcement, but removing them required a legislative act, not simply disuse.

The 2018 Repeal

That legislative act came in the form of Bill C-51, introduced by then-Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould on June 6, 2017, as part of a broader effort to remove Criminal Code provisions that were unconstitutional, redundant, or obsolete.[9][10] Alongside the duelling offence, the bill repealed the witchcraft provision, the crime comics restrictions, and several other rarely used sections, while separately amending parts of the Code relating to sexual assault procedure.[9]

Bill C-51 received royal assent on December 13, 2018, formally removing section 71 from the Criminal Code.[10]

What the Law Says Instead, Today

Repealing section 71 did not legalize violence. It simply removed the specific offence of challenging or accepting a challenge to a duel, on the reasoning that any actual harm arising from a duel was, and remains, fully covered by other parts of the Criminal Code, including assault, manslaughter, and murder.[9]

Modern Canadian law is, if anything, less forgiving of consensual violence than the era of the Perth duel. In R. v. Jobidon, the Supreme Court of Canada held that adults cannot legally consent to the intentional infliction of serious bodily harm in a fight, a ruling that arose from a fistfight outside a bar near Sudbury in 1986 that left one man dead, and that upheld a manslaughter conviction despite both men having agreed to fight.[11] The Court later confirmed and applied that principle in R. v. Paice, a case involving a fatal fistfight outside a Saskatchewan bar in 2001.[12] Under that line of cases, two people agreeing to a duel today would offer neither party any defence to a resulting assault, manslaughter, or murder charge, regardless of whether the old duelling-specific offence still existed.

Whether Canada's modern reluctance to prosecute would extend to a duel the way it once extended acquittals to John Wilson is untested and, one hopes, likely to remain that way.

References

[1] Government of Canada, Justice Laws Website, Criminal Code, Section 71 (Duelling), archived version. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/section-71-20030101.html

[2] Wikipedia, John Wilson (Ontario politician, born 1807). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilson_(Ontario_politician,_born_1807)

[3] Mysteries of Canada, Upper Canada's Last Duel. https://mysteriesofcanada.com/ontario/last-duel/

[4] Ontario Heritage Trust, Last Fatal Duel, 1833. https://www.heritagetrust.on.ca/en/plaques/last-fatal-duel-1833

[5] Lanark County Genealogy Society, The Duel of 1833. https://lanarkgenealogy.com/lcgs-online-resource-library/articles/the-duel-of-1833/

[6] Wikipedia, Robert Lyon (duellist). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lyon_(duellist)

[7] Ideablawg, Episode 57: Section 71 Duelling Is Gone But Section 70 Unlawful Drilling Remains. https://www.ideablawg.ca/blog/2019/6/23/episode-57-section-71-duelling-is-gone-but-section-70-unlawful-drilling-remains-text-version-see-podcast-page-for-audio

[8] Smithsonian Magazine, En Garde! (Nonviolent) Dueling Will Soon Be Legal in Canada. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/en-garde-dueling-will-soon-be-legal-canada-180963653/

[9] Department of Justice Canada, Bill C-51: An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Department of Justice Act. https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/cuol-mgnl/c51.html

[10] Library of Parliament, Legislative Summary of Bill C-51. https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/LegislativeSummaries/421C51E

[11] Wikipedia, R v Jobidon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Jobidon

[12] CanLII, R. v. Paice, 2005 SCC 22, [2005] 1 SCR 339. https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2005/2005scc22/2005scc22.html