Use an RSS Feed to Track the Progress of Federal Legislation

In a previous tip, I referred very briefly to the fact that the Canadian federal government and some provinces offer RSS feeds that can be used to track the progress of legislation. 

The federal RSS legislative feed is very flexible, allowing you to choose exactly what information you want to track. You can set up your feed to monitor the progress of specific (or all) bills, let you know when legislative amendments are proposed for specific acts, or see what acts have received Royal Assent. 

If you’re interested in creating your own custom RSS feed, you’ll find a box on the left hand side of the Parliamentary website with various RSS feed options (“Legislative Activities”, “Legislative Summaries”, “Create a custom RSS feed”, and “Parliament–Session”). If you click on “Create a custom RSS feed”, this will bring you to a page with a slew of options. For example, if you wanted to be alerted any time there are proposed legislative changes to the Copyright Act, you could enter “Copyright Act” in the Text search and then select “Title and Content”. You then need to choose which “bill events” you are interested in, e.g. First Reading and Royal Assent.

Once you’ve set up your feed, you probably will want to add them to a RSS reader. I use Manzama (which requires a paid subscription) since it allows me to include multiple RSS feeds in one news alert which is then emailed to me.

— Susannah Tredwell