A holiday treat for those of us who carry out British Columbia legal research: BC Laws has just added historical BC annual statutes dating back to 1858. You can find them at http://bclaws.ca/civix/content/hstats/hstats/?xsl=/templates/browse.xsl. Up until now, BC’s annual statutes were not available freely online in any format.
“Private acts” are acts that are passed to deal specifically with the private interests of a person, company, or organization; for example the Acme Assurance Company Incorporation Act, S.C. 1931, c. 71 is a private act. Private acts can be found both federally and provincially.
One challenge with researching private acts is that they may not be consolidated in their jurisdiction’s Revised Statutes. If this is the case, a researcher will have to pull the original act (which may be quite old) and any subsequent amendments, and produce a consolidation manually. On the plus side, private acts tend not …
Based on a discussion on the CALL listserv – many thanks to Martha Murphy for all the information.
One of the services typically offered by law libraries is legislative tracking. Examples of this service include tracking a bill from First Reading to Royal Assent (and beyond) and alerting users to proposed changes to an existing piece of legislation.
Depending on how much legislation they need to track, librarians can either check the source (e.g. LEGISinfo or legislative website) on a regular basis or they can set up an alert for any legislative changes. The federal government and some provinces (such …
The general rule of thumb is that acts are amended (or repealed) by acts and regulations are amended (or repealed) by regulations. Some acts do explicitly state that they can be amended by regulation, although what can be amended is usually minor (e.g. making changes to a schedule to an act).
An example of this can be found in British Columbia’s Workers Compensation Act:
(4.1) The Board may, by regulation,
(a) add to or delete from Schedule B [of the act] a disease that, in the opinion of the Board, is an occupational disease,
(b) add to or delete …
While some acts come into force on Royal Assent, many require Proclamation or an Order in Council to do so. A number of provinces publish tables that let you see if a specific act has been proclaimed.
Federal: Go to LEGISinfo, find your act and then click on the link for Coming into Force information. You can also check the Table of Public Statutes and Responsible Ministers which lists all the coming into force information for the consolidated version of an act.
Alberta: Check Recent Proclamations and the Alberta Gazette, Part I (use the Proclamations section of the Table …
While some of the paid tax resources provide reference tables that show what stage a proposed amendment to the Income Tax Act has reached, how do you figure this out if you don’t have access to one of these resources?
Step 1: What draft legislation are you interested in? Generally tax legislation is published as a “Notice of Ways and Means Motion” before it is introduced as a bill. The Department of Finance Canada provides a listing of all the Notice of Ways and Means Motions back to 2013 at https://www.fin.gc.ca/legislation/draft-avant-eng.asp. You can also find them on Taxnet Pro …
Periodically the question arises: how does one determine which English acts are still in force in Canada?
The short answer is that there is no comprehensive list of what English statutes are still in force in Canadian jurisdictions. In J.E. Cote, “The reception of English law”, (1977) 15 Alberta Law Review, 29-92, the author lists a number of statutes and the provinces in which they were still in force in 1964. This list is based in part on Appendix C (pages 1060-1064) of W.H.P. Clement, The law of the Canadian constitution, 3d ed. (Toronto: Carswell, 1916) which listed a …
One of the (many) confusing things about historical legislative research is the fact that revised statutes don’t necessarily come into force in the year of their citation. For example R.S.C. 1985, which consolidates the text of the statutes in force on December 31, 1984, came into force almost four years later on December 12, 1988. Any changes made after December 31, 1984 to Canadian statutes were published in the supplements to R.S.C. 1985.
Courthouse Libraries BC has put together a list of the in force dates for the revised statutes of the following jurisdictions:
…Regulations generally come into force on either a date specified in the regulation itself or, if no date is specified, on the date that regulation was filed. (Note that this is not the case for Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, or Québec.)
The coming into force provisions for a regulation are usually found in the Regulations Act (or equivalent) of a jurisdiction:
Tracing the legislative history of an act can be challenging, and even more so if the act you are looking at is the Income Tax Act. Here are some things to keep in mind when tracing the legislative history of the Income Tax Act: