More on Updated Justice Canada Legislative Website

This is an update to the February 27, 2007 post entitled New Department of Justice Legislative Website about the revamped federal government site for consolidated Acts and regulations.

NCALL, the National Capital Association of Law Libraries in Ottawa, recently organized a lunchtime session with legislative editors from Justice Canada who were able to provide some additional detail:

• the biggest difference to users is in the way the search engine works: statutes and regulations are broken down into sections. When a user searches for all the words "boat permit" in simple search, the system returns results where "boat" and "permit" are found in the same section. Prior to the changes, the system would also have returned results where the words could be found in different sections, sometimes wide apart from one another
• the Income Tax Act is expected to be added this summer. It has long been absent from the Justice Laws site.
• Justice Canada is also planning on adding a PDF version of statutes and regulations for side-by-side English/French viewing of legislative materials