Use a Concordance
When looking at legislation it is sometimes helpful to know if there are similar provisions in other provinces. Rather than reading through each and every statute to check for equivalent provisions, it is much faster to use a concordance.
The trick is finding a concordance for a specific act. While concordances don’t exist for all acts, they do exist for a significant number of them. Publishers often include concordances in consolidated legislation. For example, LexisNexis’s Consolidated Canada Business Corporations Act & Commentary concords the Canada Business Corporations Act with all the provincial and territorial business corporations acts.
Concordances also exist between old and new versions of legislation. For example Quickscribe includes a concordance between British Columbia’s Companies Act and Business Corporations Act (which replaced the Companies Act) in its BC Business Corporations Legislation Manual.
In addition to concordances produced by commercial publishers, governments often produce a concordance between old and new legislation when the subject is important enough. For example British Columbia provides a concordance between the Local Government Act and the Community Charter.
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