What is the current state of the law regarding the role of a judge in taking a case from the jury?

The practice was apparently introduced in England centuries ago to ensure that uneducated jurors, accustomed only to menial work, understood the full significance of the evidence they had heard. While that concern may have been valid then, it is no longer so. Modern juries are invariably composed of people with education and world experience. They are people whose daily lives require them to engage in complicated mental calculations and who regularly make decisions based on assessments of credibility and evaluation of complex information, without being led by the hand. McIntyre J., speaking for the majority in Mezzo v. The Queen, 1986 CanLII 16 (SCC), [1986] 1 S.C.R. 802, offered this opinion of modern juries when affirming a trial judge’s limited role in taking a case from the jury by directing a non-suit, at 845: There may have been a time when a paternalistic approach to unsophisticated jurors was justified. That time is now past and modern jurors represent a well-educated, well-informed and experienced cross-section of our society. If it is unsafe to preserve in today’s world the distinction between the functions of a judge and a jury, that fact would count as an argument for the entire abolition of the jury system rather than for a mere change in the law relating to the extent of the jury’s role. This would be a development that I would much regret.