Department of Justice Launches New Website for Accessing Acts and Regulations

OTTAWA, February 27, 2007 – The Department of Justice has recently launched a new website that incorporates a cutting edge, made-in-Canada search engine for accessing federal acts and regulations. The Justice Laws website (http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/) is part of a suite of tools the Department of Justice has developed to improve its legislation drafting capability.

A main benefit of the website for lawyers, law students, those who work with legislative texts or even those with a general interest in the law is its improved search engine that can be used to quickly and easily find the most current version of a statute or regulation. The new website also offers a way to carry out point-in-time searches of statutes and regulations, as well as track changes and amendments to them. For statutes, point-in-time versions date back to 2003, and March 2006 for regulations.

The new Justice Laws website will be updated within a few weeks, or even days, after the coming into force of new or amending legislation. Before the implementation of this new site, the time between updates could often take months.

This cutting edge technology is yet one more step to ensuring Canadians have ready access to current legal information.