Today’s SLAW tip is short and sweet. If you’d like to see an overview of the current status of federal bills, the Parliament of Canada website has a handy table: http://www.parl.gc.ca/LegisInfo/LAAG.aspx.
If you’re having difficulty finding the amendments made to an act by another act, make sure you’re consulting the original act rather than the consolidation. Consolidations generally omit amendments to other acts.
For example, the new British Columbia Societies Act made changes to a number of acts including the Business Corporations Act. If you wanted to see the text of those changes, you would need to look at the text of the Societies Act as it read initially rather than in its consolidated form.
One challenge with legislative research is when you need to find an older act that, although still in force, has not been included in the last statute revision. The most obvious examples of this are private acts, but there are other pieces of legislation that fall into this category.
If you are looking for an older federal act and cannot find it in the 1985 revision you should check the Table of Private Acts and the Table of Public Statutes and Responsible Ministers. The Table of Public Statutes includes “a certain number of public Acts, passed before January 1, …
Marginal notes (also known as head notes) are “the short notations appearing above or beside each section […] of an Act or Regulation” (Sullivan on the Construction of Statutes, 6th ed., §14.59). These notes are intended to help readers identify pertinent provisions in the legislation. The name comes from the fact that they originally appeared in the margins of legislation next to the relevant provisions.
Despite appearing in an act or regulation, marginal notes are not actually part of that legislation. Sullivan is rather disapproving of this:
“Although technically marginal notes are not considered part of legislation, in …