The death of Queen Elizabeth last week will have an effect on our legal system but not a major one.
Acumen Law’s Kyla Lee, was a guest of the NL Morning News and said one example is people with a Queen’s Council designation will need to make some changes. “They’ll have to order new business cards, new letterhead, update their websites, their profiles and everything like that but beyond that there’s nothing really significant that many of us in the legal profession have to do. We’ll see changes but there’s not a lot of doing for those changes.”
“There are some style of cause where people are suing the government where it will change from Her Majesty the Queen to His Majesty the King as the defendant”
She says the law is written in a way that calls for a seamless transition in most cases. “We actually contemplated this by having legislation in place that essentially defines the Queen or Her Majesty as any of the Royal sort of overseers of Canada, so it does to some extent happen automatically. Documents will be updated going forward but it’s not like everything has to be refiled and relitigated and restarted.”
Lee says in some cases, documents may need to be reprinted but she says our court system has been prepared for the day that the transition from Queen to King would be made. “We even saw that within minutes of when it was announced the Queen had died, courts were already updating their websites. The former Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta had updated within an hour to the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta, so these changes are happening quickly.”
“There were protocols in place in the event that the Queen died and given her age, everybody expected it was going to happen sooner rather than later so the mechanism was there to sort of push the button and start the process right away.”
Lee says what could take the longest amount of time is adjusting our language. “We’re so used to saying ‘The Queen’ in court or so used to referring to ‘Queen’s Council’ or the ‘Court of Queen’s Bench’ or things like that but I think what will take us the most amount of time to just start saying ‘The King’. It still feels weird, it seems weird to me when I read cases that have come out since this happened.”
Lee says she wishes all major changes could go as smoothly as they did in this case. “It’s one of the few things in our legal system that we see where we can make an overnight or within minutes change, adapt it, adopt it and move on. I wish when that when we had other massive systemic changes that had to be made we could all just do it as quickly and with a little fuss as we did in this situation.”
