Ontario Gazette Goes AWOL

On Thursday law librarians in Toronto discovered that the Ontario Gazette from 2000 to 2002 had been removed from its website, whereas the website says:

This site is presented by Publications Ontario as a pilot project to make the Gazette available to the public on the Internet. It will allow you to view all issues of the Gazette, in PDF format only, from the beginning of January 2000.

Some libraries have come to depend upon the electronic version, expecting it to all be kept on the web from January 2000 forward. An email campaign protesting the change to Publications Ontario was initiated. The first response received back was that this site was never intended to house the Ontario Gazette indefinitely, only “a few years’ worth”. The site itself does not mention this, and it was unclear what “a few years’ worth” is exactly. Regulations originally published in the Ontario Gazette can be found year-by-year or consolidated on the e-Laws website; however, this does not include all the administrative notices originally published in the Gazette. Nor does it show the regulations exactly as they appeared on the original page.

Follow-up emails of protest were then sent to Bob Krawczyk, Senior Business Solutions Adviser at Publications Ontario. His response back:

We are currently working to restore the lost Gazettes, but I am unable to confirm at this time whether it is possible. I will let you know.

TALL‘s Publishers’ Liaison Committee is going to monitor the situation on our behalf.