Among the most important pieces of legislation that came into force last January First is the Act respecting the Compilation of Québec Laws and Regulations, S.Q. 2009, c. 40 (version française : L.Q. 2009, c. 40).

Pursuant to this Act, all consolidated statutes published by the Québec Official Publisher have official status "whatever the medium used", including of course those published online by the Publications du Québec. Consolidations of regulatory texts will have official status on January first 2012. In the mean time, certain regulations will have official status if so stated within the published document.

The Act also provides that updates and consolidations must be accompanied by explanatory notes describing the nature and scope of any changes made to the published documents, which is in itself a major improvement to online publication of legislative consolidations.

Slaw already reported that Ontario and the Federal jurisdiction also have granted official status to their online consolidations of laws. What will be the next Canadian jurisdiction to jump in?

Louise Hamel, manager of the Judges' Library for Ontario Courts, just announced to Canadian legal publishers that beginning January 2, 2010, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice will assign a neutral citation to their decisions, except for the Small Claims Court.

The Neutral Citation Standard for Case Law was developed in 1998 by the Canadian Citation Committee, an informal group that brought together various specialists in legal information from the judiciary, academia and the publishing industry, including slawers Martin Felsky and Daniel Poulin. The standard was approved in 1999 by the Canadian Judicial Council and has since then been implemented in all Canadian courts as well as in a growing number of tribunals.

The Neutral Citation allows for a simple, official and permanent citation method for decisions and is assigned by the court when the decision is distributed. The standard is now part of the Canadian Citation Committee's guide entitled The Preparation, Citation and Distribution of Canadian Decisions (April 2009).

As recently posted here, the CanLII website will soon have all Canadian jurisdictions included in its new point-in-time legislation publication system. I thought that slaw readers would be interested in having some more insight about the project. Let's begin with preliminary figures and some trivia about legislation available online from governments' websites, which are the source of CanLII's databases.

Over 6,000 updated public Acts are available online in all Canadian jurisdictions, averaging about 450 per jurisdiction. These figures double for corresponding enabled regulations. Not surprisingly, the Province of Ontario posts the largest number of effective public acts – about 700 – while the northern territories each consolidate less than 250. Demographics seem to be a factor, but we should also bear in mind that the criteria for including certain types of Acts in an online consolidation slightly differs from one jurisdiction to another; sometimes only statutes from official revisions are included but most of the time new annual public statutes are also part of an online consolidation.

Since CanLII's new system is largely about presenting legislation as it was in force in the past, we were able to estimate that each consolidated Act gets amended once every 3 years on average, but about 40% were not amended at all over the last 5 years. While lawyers from Western and Atlantic Canada have to deal with about 125 changes per year to their consolidated statutes in order to stay current, those in Ontario and Quebec are faced with more than 300 changes yearly. The federal level stands in between with about 200.

When endeavoring in such a broad and comprehensive project one must be prepared to come across situations you do not typically encounter in day-to-day legal research, but should nevertheless be taken into account. For instance as some of you may be aware of, a statute can be embedded in another statute and a provincial regulation can be enabled by a federal Act.

Legislation can also make you smile. Only a very few among you, if any, are likely to have searched for legislation governing subject-matters such as your province's emblematic dog, our national sports or standards for manufacturing the Canadian flag. By the way, did you know that the Yukon territory has an official tartan? We also learned that legislatures can be quite creative with titles, my personal favorite being Ontario's Fairness is a Two-Way Street Act.

LexUM plans to progressively improve CanLII's legislation publication system in terms of usability, content and currentness. The most requested improvement based on user feedback to date would be the availability of content tables linking to parts, chapters and sections of legislative texts. We are working on this. We will also facilitate searching by adding common names and acronyms of legislative texts (e.g. the "Charter", "PIPEDA") in our search index. We will also add annual legislation. Many other improvements are on our wishlist. Any suggestions?