H. Finding Legislation

• Author: Ted Tjaden
• Profession: National Director of Knowledge Management McMillan LLP
• Pages: 124-126

Page 124

The Canadian federal, provincial, and territorial governments have greatly improved access to their statutes and regulations in the last several years, joined in part by the efforts of the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CANLII, www.canlii.org). Because of this, you can conduct good quality legislative research in Canada using free resources, either directly at the particular government’s website (listed in Table 5.10) or via CANLII. One advantage of CANLII is the ability to search legislation across more than one jurisdiction. An excellent online guide for conducting Canadian legislative research is "Canadian Legislation Online" published by the Law Society of Upper Canada.¹²Although some governments have been slow to make their online versions of legislation official, the federal,¹³Ontario,¹⁴and Québec,¹⁵governments have done so. In addition to statutes and regulations, individual government websites also usually include access to current (and some historical) legislative bills, Hansard debates, and other related documents. Most of the government websites have only the current or fairly recent versions of legislation, with little historical archives of older versions of statutes, regulations, or bills. One major exception, however, is the Alberta Heritage Digitization Project’s Retrospective Law Collection,¹⁶where Alberta statutes have been digitized from 1906 to 1990 and made available online at this site for free, with plans to digitize retrospective bills and Gazettes. In addition, the federal government is in the process of digitizing the Canada Gazette,¹⁷and efforts are underway by a coalition of law libraries and others to make Ontario legislation available via the Canadian Libraries section of the Internet Archive.¹⁸

Page 125

Table 5.10

Online Government Legislative Websites

[SEE ATTACHED PDF]

The ease-of-use and the currency of information on these freely available government websites varies from province to province, as does the range of legislative information that is available.

There has been a move in several jurisdictions, including Canada, to establish online "Legal Information Institutes," which allow the researcher to search for case law and legislation of the jurisdiction in question using a single search engine/interface, thereby eliminating the need to visit individual case law or legislative websites (see Table 5.11 for a list of these sites).

Page 126

Table 5.11

Legal Information Institute...