LégisQuébec – The (In)completeness of an Official Consolidated Law

Earlier this week, a patron called the library asking about the publication procedure for Quebec legislation. He wanted to know whether the consolidated statutes and regulations published by Publications Québec on LégisQuébec were actually consolidated and up to date, and included any amendments soon to come into force. Specifically, he was seeing some inconsistencies with the Consumer Protection Act.

My initial response was affirmative – after all, the consolidated legislation on LégisQuébec includes an update date and has official status. If a bill amending the legislation had been passed prior to the update date, it would be reasonable to expect that the amendments had been integrated somehow into the official consolidated version.

This expectation was reinforced in me in particular as a result of my experience regularly seeing gray boxes with the amended provisions and coming into force information integrated throughout official consolidated legislation.

Consequently, I believed it was in error that the new section 119.1 of the Consumer Protection Act, introduced via section 27 of Bill 134 and set to come into force on August 1st, 2019 (order in council 987-2018), was excluded from the official, consolidated Consumer Protection Act. To that end, I sent an email to Publications Québec, asking them if this was an unintentional error.

Publication Québec’s Approach to Consolidating Laws

The next morning, I received a phone call from a representative of Publications Québec informing me that there was no error on their part. Rather, the absence of 119.1 from the consolidated act was the result of an editorial decision taken by Publications Québec years ago (and which was too complicated to explain in writing, and better explained verbally).

In sum, I was told that despite the signs that led me to believe that the consolidated legislation published on LégisQuébec does integrate amending legislation not yet in force, in fact, Publications Québec does not integrate all amendments brought in by a new law. This is true even if an order in council has been published in the Gazette officielle du Québec proclaiming the coming into force of the various provisions of the amending law. Confusingly, Publications Québec only integrate SOME amendments.

According to the representative from Publications Québec, an amendment will only appear in a gray box if it modifies a provision currently in force and its coming into force date has been published; anything that is entirely new law will not appear in the consolidated law until it actually comes into force. The justification for this editorial decision? (1) To reduce the number of gray boxes that appear throughout the consolidated legislation and improve the readability of legislation. (2) To minimize the risk of integrating amending provisions that would end up never coming into force.

Implications of Publications Québec’s Editorial Decision

According to the representative from Publications Québec, there is no plan to change their editorial process. What this means concretely, is that:

  • When you are looking at a piece of legislation on LégisQuébec, you can never know for sure if tomorrow, that piece of legislation will look entirely different.
  • When you are looking at a piece of legislation on LégisQuébec and you see gray boxes with coming-into-force information, you should not assume that it gives you a complete picture of the law soon to come into force.
  • In order to obtain a complete picture of a law or to be sure that the piece of legislation you are looking at has not been modified by a law soon to come into force, you will have to:
    1. Search for a modifying bill;
    2. Confirm it has received royal assent;
    3. Search Part 2 of the Gazette Officielle du Québec for coming into force information; and
    4. Consolidate, either manually or by using a consolidating tool like this one.

Journals of the Senate and of the House of Commons added to the Canadian Parliamentary Historical Resources

As we wrote previously, in 2013, the Library of Parliament, in collaboration with Canadiana.org, launched its digital portal. In addition to the free public access to digital versions of the historical debates of the Parliament of Canada in both official languages for both the Senate and the House of Commons from Parliament 1, Session 1, 1867, the portal gives now access to Journals of the Senate and of the House of Commons, the official records of decisions and parliamentary business.

 

Parliament’s Historical Debates Available Online

The Library of Parliament, in collaboration with Canadiana.org, is launching its Historical Debates of the Parliament of Canada digital portal.  The portal provides free public access to digital versions of the historical debates of the Parliament of Canada in both official languages.  It includes all published debates of both the Senate and the House of Commons from Parliament 1, Session 1 until coverage provided on the Parliament of Canada page.

New UN Research Guide

The UN Library created a new research guide that reflects the complexity of the UN’ documentation and helps the users to navigate it. The UN Documentation Research Guide presents an overview of selected UN documents, publications, databases and websites. It provides details on the patterns of documentation of the active principal UN organs. It presents documentation of the organs and subsidiary bodies involved in areas of interest to many researchers. You can find the link to the new guide in the Law Subject Guide under Guides and aids for legal research.

New resorce for finding Canadian government and legislative publications

The Association of Parliamentary Libraries in Canada (APLIC) has announced the release of its unique pan-Canadian bilingual government and legislative publications portal GALLOPP (Government and Legislative Libraries Online Publications Portal) / PPGPE (Portail des publications gouvernementales et parlementaires électroniques). This portal is a result of collaboration between provincial and territorial legislative libraries from across Canada and the federal government’s Depository Services Program (DSP). It provides one-stop access to over 320,000 electronic provincial, territorial and federal government publications and legislative materials dating back to 1995 that were collected by Legislative libraries in Canada for their jurisdictions. As of 2013-07-12 the portal provides full-text access to the content from the electronic government documents collections of the following libraries:

  • Alberta Legislature Library
  • Legislative Library of British Columbia
  • Manitoba Legislative Library
  • New Brunswick Legislative Library
  • Newfoundland and Labrador Legislative Library
  • Northwest Territories Legislative Library
  • Nova Scotia Legislative Library
  • Ontario Legislative Library
  • Library of the National Assembly, Québec
  • Saskatchewan Legislative Library
  • Government of Canada-Depository Services Program

The portal can be accessed through our Law Subject Guide, in the Canadian Legislation and Cases section.

Publications of the Senate and the House of Commons

As of September 2012, all the publications of the Senate of Canada and the House of Commons are available in electronic format only. Therefore, Publishing and Depository Services / Éditions et Services de dépôt  will no longer sell and distribute Parliamentary publications in paper format. PDS are working closely with the Senate of Canada and the House of Commons to make these publications available in PDF format on the Government of Canada Publications web site. Meanwhile, you can find all the latest Reports of the Committees of the Senate of Canada and the House of Commons here.