The Wild West days of space exploration are over for Canadians as a new law now extends Canadian criminal jurisdiction to the moon. The expansion of jurisdiction was in a Criminal Code amendment buried deep in the 2022 federal budget.
Canadians in general seemed non-plussed by the idea.
The new Criminal Code amendment was specifically added because of Canada's planned involvement in the Lunar Gateway, a NASA mission to establish a permanent space station in lunar orbit.
The law reads:
A Canadian crew member who, during a space flight, commits an act or omission outside Canada that if committed in Canada would constitute an indictable offence is deemed to have committed that act or omission in Canada.
Canadians should hurry if they want to do whatever they please in space (as long as it's not on the International Space Station, which is governed by international treaties). Astronauts can honk their rockets' horns to their hearts' content or talk about God without fear of imprisonment for hateful speech. When this law is enacted, I assume such violent crimes will get you sent to the space gulag.
In all seriousness though, according to the Calgary Herald:
Canada has actually become embroiled in a legal scenario of this kind before, although it involved the legally ambiguous jurisdiction of an iceberg rather than space.
In 1970, a U.S. citizen living in a research station aboard a floating ice sheet shot a fellow researcher to death over a dispute involving a stolen bottle of homemade wine. Both the accused and the victim were U.S. citizens living in a U.S. facility, but the iceberg happened to be within Canadian territory at the time of the crime.
The whole thing was a mess, and Canada hopes to avoid that sort of kerfuffle in the future when their citizens start inevitably murdering people in space!
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