Federal stats & regs website overhaul – maybe not so hot
As posted on Slaw this morning, the statutes and regulations part of the Justice Canada website recently got an overhaul.
I was interested to see what they’d done; for us, the site has been basically nothing but trouble because it’s not reliably up to date. While the website doesn’t look any different (which is unfortunate, because it’s still not very intuitive), it now offers point-in-time for both stats and regs, which is pretty sweet.
Oddly enough, though, the Federal Accountability Act, S.C. 2006, c. 9, is nowhere to be found – not even a reference to it. I couldn’t find it anywhere but the LegisInfo site. This is a little troubling because it received Royal Assent in December 2007 and certain sections are already in force. Maybe they don’t publish a statute unless the whole thing is in force? That doesn’t make any sense. More likely, they are still just behind in updating the site. Tricky, very tricky.
Like most things in life, you get what you pay for, and sometimes no information is better than wrong information. We’ve got a combo of two now. We’re been warning our students and lawyers not to rely on the free sources on the internet for this reason. Even with these improvements, I probably won’t be relying on the new Justice Laws site.
To be fair, we are warned to check more than just this site, in the “Important Notice” located at the bottom of every page (buried after the copyright information):
” For all purposes of interpreting and applying the law, users should consult:
- the Acts as passed by Parliament, which are published in the “Assented to” Acts service, Part III of the Canada Gazette and the annual Statutes of Canada, and
- the regulations, as registered by the Clerk of the Privy Council and published in Part II of the Canada Gazette.”
Unfortunately, most people are never going to read that little notice, and might assume they are looking at everything there is. And not just lay researchers – we are all vulnerable to the allure of stuff available free on the internet.
I think we’d gladly pay for a QP-Legaleze-esque version of federal statutes… but for now, WestlaweCarswell and QL will have to do.