This section of the site lists “all the chapters of the Revised Statutes, 1985, with their amendments and certain other Public Acts and their amendments.”

This table is updated more or less continuously... You can find the chapter number of the most recent act included, and the publication date of the most recent Canada Gazette at the top of the homepage for the Table. The significance of the Gazette is that it’s where proclamations that bring acts into force are published.

Why is this important? Some acts come into force on Royal Assent or on a deemed date, past or future. Others require a certain event to take place, such as some other act being passed.  Many acts, however, require a proclamation by the Governor in Council to come into force. Years can pass between an act being passed, and the proclamation bringing it into force being issued. Therefore, by knowing which Gazettes they have included in their updates, you’ll know how up to date their inclusion of any proclamations is.

Here is where you can get a detailed list of all the amendments to every act in the “Consolidated Act” section, organized alphabetically by name of act. Amendments are listed by section of the act, and often include useful notes about what kind of change is being made, like “added” or “repealed”, as well as the citation to the act that makes the change.

While this information essentially duplicates the predecessor section annotations in the statutes, there is additional important information as well: For each act, after the list of sections with amendments and any general amendments, there is a section where each entry starts with the letters “CIF”. This stands for “coming into force” and is a chronological list of all the amendments listed above with information on how and when they came into force. Because acts sometimes come into force in complicated ways, such as only parts of sections, or when certain events happen, it’s especially helpful that this information tends to be included in as much detail as is needed for clarity. Also convenient, for those items that came into force on proclamation, the Statutory Instrument or SI number is also included, so you can go look at the actual proclamation.  If CIF information for an amendment is not included, this means that the amendment is not yet in force

As you can see, the Table of Public Statutes and Responsible Ministers contains a wealth of valuable information. When in doubt about what has happened to an act, or when it happened, check here first!