Legislation

NATIONAL
CANLII - Canadian Legal Information Institute

FEDERAL
Canada's Parliament
LEGISinfo
Canada Gazette
Canada Department of Justice - Consolidated Statutes and Regulations

ONTARIO
E-laws
Ontario Gazette
Ontario Legislative Assembly

INTERNATIONAL
AustLII - Australasian Legal Information Institute
BAILII - British and Irish Legal Information Institute

CANLII - Canadian Legal Information Institute
Law library and legal research blogs and forums have seen a lot of discussion about CanLII’s latest upgrades.  As stated on its homepage, CanLII is a non-profit organization managed by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. Its goal is to make Canadian law accessible for free on the Internet.  The new version of CanLII came online on March 20, 2007, and was not without some initial problems. Many of these have been solved now, and reviews of this new version are generally favourable.  The new CanLII interface is more intuitive and cleaner looking.  It now offers an advanced search function for searching across databases, and highlights search terms within the retrieved documents.  Among other improvements, all decisions are now provided in both html and pdf format and all documents are clearly identified using neutral citations.  Best of all for researchers wanting to stay on top of the latest cases, CanLII now includes RSS feeds which allow the user to be notified when new decisions are added. Click on http://www.canlii.org/

FEDERAL

Canada's Parliament
This site is maintained jointly by the House of Commons, Senate and Library of Parliament and includes the debates of the Senate and House of Commons, Journals, Order Papers and Notices, and Progress of Legislation. The site includes legislative summaries for each bill going through the House.  http://www.parl.gc.ca/

LEGISinfo 
This new electronic resource is a collaborative effort of the Parliamentary Research Branch and the Information and Documentation Branch of the Library of Parliament. LEGISInfo describes itself is an essential research tool for finding information on legislation currently before Parliament. This tool provides electronic access to a wide range of information about individual bills, such as:  the text of the bill at various stages, government press releases and backgrounders, legislative summaries, important speeches at second reading, recorded votes, and coming into force data.  Furthermore, a section called FAQ on the Parliament of Canada supplies a great deal of supplementary information and answers to questions like “How does a bill become law?” and “What happens in caucus?” LEGISInfo is easy to navigate and provides a good one-stop-shopping source for everything you may need to know about developing legislation. http://www.parl.gc.ca/legisinfo

Canada Gazette
All three parts of the Gazette are available free of charge, in bilingual PDF format, searchable using Adobe Acrobat or html format.  Published every Saturday, Canada Gazette, Part I contains all formal public notices, official appointments and proposed regulations. Part II is published every second Wednesday, and contains regulations and other statutory instruments. Part III contains the Public Acts of Canada, and its purpose is to publish this new legislation as soon as possible after it receives Royal Assent. Anyone who has ever had to search this material in the good old fashioned print version will appreciate the accessibility of this digital format, with coverage starting from January 1998. http://www.gazette.gc.ca

Consolidated Statutes and Regulations
The Department of Justice's site has a history of being woefully out of date but it appears that this situation has been rectified. The site has finally been upgraded to allow for timely and regular updates.  The site also has a point-in-time feature that allows you to see versions if acts back to Jan 1, 2003 and regulations back to Mar 22, 2006. Although the site holds much older, consolidated law (some acts even dating back to 1870), you can access all annual statutes as passed by year back to 2002 . http://laws.justice.gc.ca 

ONTARIO

E-Laws
The e-Laws web site offers quick, easy and comprehensive access to the consolidated laws of Ontario. After having cut back on the availability of Ontario statutes in hard copy, primarily by reducing access to the printed Bills service, this site is a major step in the Government of Ontario's ongoing efforts to improve access to up-to-date laws. Its goal is to provide consolidated statutes and regulations that are up to date within 10 business days of enactment of a new law or amendment of an existing law.

It is easy to start a search simply by clicking on the standard search button and filling in the 3 boxes: statutes and/or regulations, contents or title, and sort by title or number of hits. Or, if you want to get fancy, you can choose any of the clear but detailed help screens which explain advanced features like browsing, specific searches, and searching within a statute or regulation.

This site also includes reference tables that will enable you to check for recent changes in the law. You may also link to the Legislative Assembly's web site to see bills.  This is now the first place we go to when looking for Ontario law. This site can be accessed at www.e-laws.gov.on.ca

Ontario Gazette
This site links into .pdf versions of the individual issues of the Ontario Gazette and the main search template is rudimentary at best.  If you know the particular gazette issue you need to access, then this site will work, but searching is problematic.  Searches for "costs and grid" and "courts and justice and regulations" failed, although both the costs grid and all other Courts of Justice Act regulations are available within the issues.  The site carries issues from 2000 forward, and can be accessed at http://www.ontariogazette.gov.on.ca

INTERNATIONAL

AustLII - Australasian Legal Information Institute
This is the first of the global legal information institute sites and its software and expertise were used to build all the other sites that followed.  Its goal was to provide free access to primary source materials from the country such as legislation and case law and selected secondary materials created for public use.   Using a powerful search platform and employing embedded hyperlinks to case law references, AUSTLII allows the user to search all materials together or search within sub-categories, such as New South Wales: Supreme Court Cases.  The site can be accessed at http://www.austlii.edu.au/

BAILII - British and Irish Legal Information Institute
This site offers free access to primary British and Irish legal information. Developed using the same software platform as AUSTLII, it allows for cross-jurisdictional searching of case law and legislation for England, Scotland and Ireland.  Cases include imbedded links to cases and legislation both within the United Kingdom and internationally, plus the site provides links to other partners such as WORLDLII, CANLII and AUSTLII to name a few.  The site can be accessed at http://www.bailii.org