Hello

This tutorial is intended to help you familiarize yourself with the Department of Justice’s Laws website by showing you the various resources available to you, and how you can get the most out of them.

The Justice Laws website is a free source for Federal legislation, including statutes and regulations. In addition, it includes a variety of useful tools to help you with your research. Best of all, since June 1 2009, the electronic versions of legislation found on this website are official copies of federal law.

You can access the site by entering the URL laws-lois.justice.gc.ca

The most popular part of the site tends to be the “Consolidated Acts” area. Here you can find consolidated versions of all public acts currently in force. “Consolidated” means that any amendments to the acts, such as added or repealed provisions or changes to the language of the act, have been applied. Rather than having to cut and paste together a twenty year old act with all the amending acts over the years, you can easily view the current in force version here. Usually this is up to date to within about a week.

Generally speaking, if you know the name of the act that you are interested in, it is easier to browse to it, rather than search for it.

Click on the “Consolidated Acts” link found in the left hand margin. This provides access to an alphabetical list of statute names, divided into sections for each letter of the alphabet. Select the letter that corresponds with the name of the act that you’re looking for.

For each act, you can immediately access the PDF version, or click on the name of the act to access the HTML and XML versions.

The PDF version is easiest to read, and has the most predictable pagination. If you are looking for a copy of an act to take to court, this is probably the version that you want. The html version of an act is easiest to do a “search within”, if you are looking for particular language and allows you to see the entire act in an easily search-able and scrollable format.

If you click on the name of the act, in addition to being able to access HTML and XML versions of the act, you will be taken to a table of contents for the act. This landing page also includes other useful information, such as a statement of the act’s currency.

The table of contents links the act at various points. If the act has formal divisions, the links will go to these. If the act doesn’t have divisions, the designers of the website have tended to link to major thematic sections of the act, such as Short Title, Interpretation, or sections that authorize regulations. Helpfully, the section number at the start of every one of these divisions is listed, so it is easy to tell where you are in the act.

Once you are within the act, there is quite a lot of useful information available to you, in addition to the text of the act itself.

Firstly, for acts passed after the 1985 statute revision, for any section that has been amended, you can find information about the amendments written in a smaller font below the section. For acts that go back to 1985, you will see a citation to the chapter and section from that revision. This is called the “predecessor section”. This can be useful if you are trying to figure out when or where a section came from, or what has happened to it over the years: Every amendment to the section is listed. For sections that have been amended frequently, this can be quite a long list!

As well, you might see blue text that reads “Previous Version”. Clicking on this link will show you how that particular section read at a previous point in time. This feature covers changes dating from roughly January 1, 2003. If the section has multiple versions, you can move forward and backward between them using the Previous Version | Next Version links at the top of the page.

If you want to see how an entire act or regulation read on a particular date in the past, you can use the “Previous Versions” button on every act’s “homepage”. Acts go back to January 1st, 2003, while regulations only go back to March 22nd, 2006.

Secondly, you may notice that sometimes some of the text of the act appears “greyed out”. These are provisions in original enactments that are not yet in force. As those provisions are brought into force, the shading will be removed.

Not yet in force *amendments* will be included at the end of the act in an “amendments not in force” section. Text from unproclaimed or otherwise not yet in force amendments is listed here. Once these amendments come into force, the text will be incorporated into the body of the act.

If you are looking for regulations made under an act there are 2 ways to go about this ...

The first option is that if you know the name of the regulation itself, rather than just the name of the enabling statute, you can use the “Consolidated Regulations” link, which will take you to a page where you can select the matching letter to get an alphabetized list of all the regulations starting with that letter.

Your other option is best for when you know the name of the enabling statute and you either don’t know the name of the regulation, or you want to see all the regulations under a particular statute. In this case, it is easiest to go in by the Consolidated Acts link. Browse to the correct letter, and then scroll down to the act that you are interested in. If the act has enabled regulations, you will see a small yellow box with an “R” on it to the right of the name of the act. Clicking on this link will take you to the homepage of the act, where all of its regulations will be listed at the bottom of the page under the title “Regulations made under this Act”. Like with acts, the pdf format is best for court, while html is best for searching.

While the consolidated statutes and regulations are the most popular part of the Justice Laws Website, it has many other useful finding aids and tools. Watch the other tutorials to learn more about what you can do with Justice Laws.