The Quebec Act of 1774 restored which legal system while maintaining British criminal law?

This question tests one half of the dual-system arrangement Discover Canada describes for the Quebec Act of 1774. The guide states the arrangement directly: The Quebec Act restored French civil law while maintaining British criminal law. So the answer is French civil law — restored as the law governing private, day-to-day legal matters — while criminal law in the colony stayed British.

The guide gives the political reason for this hybrid in the same paragraph. After the British conquered the colony at the Plains of Abraham in 1759, the Crown was governing a French-speaking, Catholic majority. Discover Canada records: To better govern the French Roman Catholic majority, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act of 1774. One of the constitutional foundations of Canada, the Quebec Act accommodated the principles of British institutions to the reality of the province. The restoration of French civil law was the most concrete piece of that accommodation in everyday life.

The dual-system idea also explains a wider feature of Canadian law to this day. The same legal heritage shows up in Discover Canada's description of the country's broader legal background: the Charter rests on "English common law, the civil code of France, and the unwritten constitution that we have inherited from Great Britain." Civil-law tradition entering Canada through Quebec, and English common-law tradition for the rest, traces back directly to the Quebec Act of 1774 — which kept the French civil-law system rather than replacing it with English common law.

The question is asking new citizens to recognise Discover Canada's description of Canada as a country with two parallel legal traditions. The Quebec Act is the moment in the guide where that becomes formal: French civil law for private matters in Quebec, British criminal law for criminal matters everywhere. Picking the wrong answer here means missing one of the basic structural facts about Canadian law.

The right answer also has a forward connection. Discover Canada credits the Quebec Act as "one of the constitutional foundations of Canada," meaning the 1774 statute is part of the chain of foundational documents that shaped the country — alongside the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the British North America Act of 1867 and the Charter of 1982.