Consolidated Statutes (English)
http://canada.justice.gc.ca/Loireg/index_en.html
Lois codifiées (français)
http://canada.justice.gc.ca/Loireg/index_fr.html
Let me start this review by congratulating the Department of Justice
of Canada on its excellent initiative in providing free access
via Internet to the laws and regulations governing our land.
Would that provincial governments were as progressive. 3
The Consolidated Statutes, as well as the Consolidated
Regulations, (both updated to December 31, 1995 at the time
of writing) are housed on a Folio Web Server, which means that
when accessed via Internet they are searched using the sophisticated
search features of Folio Views, the interface which seems to be
on its way to becoming the standard for Canadian legal CD-ROM
databases. Note that these consolidations are not official
versions.
While Folio is very powerful, its use is somewhat less than intuitive.
Those who are already familiar with it, through experience with
CD-ROM, should have no difficulty navigating around the Internet
version. For those who have never used Folio before however,
there will definitely be a learning curve. Unlike
simple search engines on the Internet (WebCrawler for example),
the first Folio screen does not present the user with the typical
form allowing even an inexperienced searcher to do a sort of "groping"
search. Probably the biggest shortcoming is the inadequacy of
the online explanations and documentation. Judicious use of on-screen
hints and sample searches would make all the difference.
For Folio neophytes, careful reading of the online Help will
be essential before getting started.
This being said however, it should in no way be taken to discourage use of
the Internet site, but merely as an indication that
a little initial homework may be required.
It is worth mentioning that if you use the statutes and regulations
regularly, you should consider investing in the CD-ROM version,
which also runs on Folio. Due to the inherent differences between
CD-ROM and the Internet, the former is able to incorporate features
not feasible on Internet, which makes it a more practical tool
for frequent use. The differences between the two versions have
been explained in detail by Ed Hicks of the Department of Justice. 4
The Statutes and Regulations are accessed from the Department
of Justice home page:
http://canada.justice.gc.ca
| English (or French) | Laws
From the Laws page, you can also access Constitutional
Laws of Canada (1867-1982), Annual Statutes of Canada 1995
, Table of Public Statutes and Explanations on Statutes
Structure. The following discussion refers to the Consolidated
Statutes but the comments are equally valid for the other
databases.
What distinguishes Folio from more traditional interfaces is that
it permits two quite different approaches to searching. The first,
into which the user is led by default, will be more familiar to
those who are still more comfortable browsing through the Table
of Contents of a printed volume than conducting an online keyword
search, because that is what it allows you to do. Experienced
online searchers, on the other hand, will probably gravitate towards
the second, which permits the usual word and phrase searching,
Boolean operators, etc.
Clicking on Consolidated Statutes leads you to a Table
of Contents which comprises an alphabetical list of all statutes.
A standard Folio tool bar appears at the top, but with no explanation
of the icons.
As is the case wherever you see a "+" sign to the left
of a heading, the title of each act can be expanded by clicking
on the "+" to show lower levels of headings, all the
way down through Part and Division headings, subheadings and margin
notes. If you are interested in a specific act and have a rough
idea of what you are looking for, this provides a convenient way
of "burrowing down" to find the exact section you want.
If you decide you are on the wrong track you, can compress the
detailed headings by clicking on a "-" sign at the level
to which you want to backtrack. At any point in the expansion/compression
process, as soon as you see a heading which represents the part
of the act you wish to view, clicking on the name of the heading
itself will bring up the text of the appropriate section(s).
This process works well but with one serious irritant. The statutes
are grouped by initial letter. When expanding an act at the end
of a large group, e.g. Customs Tariff, which appears after
six screens of Canada ... and Canadian ..., every
time you expand one level you are returned to the beginning of
the "C" group and must scroll through the same six screens
to get back to where you were.
Clicking on the "Query" icon on the Table of Contents
page brings up a screen with a form where you can enter a traditional
Boolean search. Below the form is a "Results Map" which
shows the number of occurrences of each word, followed by the
total number in combination; useful in allowing you to get a feel
for the appropriateness of your search and reformulating it if
necessary.
The Query function would really benefit from having some on-screen
help. For example, to search for "appropriate person"
as a phrase, I tried entering just:
appropriate person
and obtained some 368 hits. When viewed, it was apparent that
the system had retrieved all sections containing both the words
"appropriate" and "person", but not necessarily
as a phrase. While I would probably have got to it faster by
guess-work, it took me close to five minutes to load the Help and
scour it to find: "If you want to search a specific phrase
you should enclose the entire phrase within quotation marks",
allowing me to retrieve a more reasonable 35 hits. An on-screen
example could have told me this in two seconds. A similar example
could have avoided having to repeat the process to establish
that: "You can also use wildcards -- $ and * -- within your
queries." (particularly for those of us brought up on QL,
who are used to using !).
The range of the Boolean "AND" is even harder to determine.
The Help provides no more than the vague indication that "You
may query for ... compound searches with Boolean operators"
and "All types of queries ... including use of Boolean operators,
are permitted". You have to leave the Consolidated Statutes
and click on the link to Explanations on Statutes Structure
before discovering that a "record" .... "is
an individual section or, where a section is divided into subsections,
an individual subsection" and that "when conducting
boolean or proximity searches, those searches are restricted to
[a] record". This same section of the Explanations on
Statutes Structure offers further advice: "It is highly
recommended to new users to complete the tutorial from the help
menu option ...". No doubt the tutorial would have been
most helpful. Unfortunately, try as I might I was unable to locate
it.
An obvious question is: "Can I do a keyword search in a specific
statute?" The answer is "Yes", but good luck figuring
out how to do it! Working from a somewhat cryptic statement in
the Help combined with a definition of the Levels found in the
Explanation on Statutes Structure I composed a search statement
which I thought would do the trick -- it did not. It was only
with the help of Ed Hicks at the Department of Justice that I
managed to correctly formulate a search for "director*"
and "branch" limited to the Canada Business Corporations
Act:
[level title of act/canada business corporations act:]
director* branch
On the other hand, this search could have been more easily simulated
by doing it in the entire database and then displaying the text
of only those hits occurring in the act in question (see below).
Once you have some hits, how do you view the actual text? In
Folio, this is not necessarily obvious. If you have used the
first searching approach of burrowing down through the Table of
Contents, it is straightforward. As soon as you see a relevant
heading, you click on the heading name and there you have the
text.
If, on the other hand, you have done a search using "Query",
you find yourself with a screen telling you that you have, for
example, 35 hits -- then what? Again, there are two approaches:
This procedure will be familiar to all online searchers. A "chunk"
of the statute containing the first hit is displayed, with the
search terms clearly indicated by red arrows on either side.
Initiating the display, however, is not what I would call intuitive.
It requires clicking on the "Document" icon (again,
no on-screen instructions). Subsequently, you can display consecutive
hits by skipping from chunk to chunk using the "Prev Hit"
and "Next Hit" icons (not to be confused with the "Previous"
and "Next" icons which bring you to the section(s) of
the act immediately prior to or following the one where your search
terms occur).
The word "chunk" is deliberately chosen to bear no relation
to any logical division (e.g. section) within a statute, although
chunks generally start at the beginning of a section and contain
an integral number of them (on average about fifteen to twenty). It refers
to an amount of text which constitutes a file of reasonable size
to transfer over the Internet without undue delay and normally
represents about six to seven pages typed in, for example, WordPerfect.
A second option is to click on the "Contents" icon which
will bring you back to the Table of Contents with the number of
hits displayed. A minor inconvenience is that you are returned
to the most compressed level (level 1) where, in the case of the
35 hits in the example above, all you see is:
35 "+" CONSOLIDATED STATUTES OF CANADA
which does not tell you any more than you already knew. You will
need to expand to level 3 before you get something more useful,
in the form of an alphabetical list of acts with the distribution
of hits indicated, e.g.
35 CONSOLIDATED STATUTES OF CANADA
7 Bank Act
6 Canada Business Corporations Act
7 Cooperative Credit Associations Act
(not complete)
Thus if you are only interested in the Canada Business Corporations
Act, you see immediately that there are six relevant hits.
This is the display feature referred to above which allows you
to simulate a search in a specific act.
You can further expand the Table of Contents to give you the distribution
of hits in individual sections of the acts. Note, however, that
if you click on a heading name before you have reached the most
expanded level, you will not necessarily retrieve the chunk containing
your search terms.
This display method, not available with less sophisticated Internet
search engines, is particularly useful if your search retrieves
a large number of hits, since it enables you to quickly eliminate
those in acts which are obviously not relevant.
Whichever of the two methods you use to display, you will end
up viewing a chunk of a statute containing your search term(s).
There are a number of points worthy of mention here.
The reference window is one of the most useful features of Folio.
When you display a chunk of text, a window appears at the top
telling you exactly where you are: the act, the part, the division
and the subheading, when appropriate, e.g.
CONSOLIDATED STATUTES OF CANADA
C
Canada Business Corporations Act
PART VII SECURITY CERTIFICATES, REGISTERS AND TRANSFERS
Purchase
Without this means of orientation you could very quickly become
quite lost.
The less satisfactory aspect is that, as you scroll down through
the text, this window disappears, as does the tool bar with the
icons for navigating. In order to refer to the window, or to
proceed to the next hit, you must return to the top of the current
chunk (or alternatively scroll to the end, where there is a link
for "next hit").
Unlike the CD-ROM, the Internet version of the statutes does not
display graphics. It is particularly annoying to learn this only
after persistently getting the ubiquitous "General Protection
Fault" error when clicking on VIEW 1 to retrieve the
words and music of the National Anthem, for example. This gap
poses a more serious problem when you realize that all information
in tabular form is "graphics". For instance, if you
access the Customs Tariff and click on the link to Schedules
I to VII, all you retrieve is the following note: "[Note:
Schedules are not displayed]".
When you display a chunk of text, you will notice that the "margin
notes" (appearing here as a heading rather than actually
in the margin) are underlined and in blue, indicating that they
link with another document. This may be mystifying at first glance,
but it is the manifestation of a very useful feature: a direct
link with the same section in the other language (i.e. with the
French version if you are searching in English). Of course, it
would be even nicer to be able to display the two versions, side
by side, in two distinct windows. Unfortunately, however, Internet
technology is not quite there yet. In the Regulations it is the
section number which links with the version in the other language.
You can print or download chunks of text by using the appropriate
function of your browser. Note that in Netscape at least, the
default download is in HTML format. You will want to change this
to "Plain Text" (or its equivalent in other browsers),
but that is all you will get; you will lose all other formatting.
A major disadvantage is that it is extremely cumbersome to download
anything more than a few chunks, which generally constitute only
a small proportion of a statute. This, of course, is a function
of the Internet itself and the need to divide documents into small
pieces for reasonable transfer speeds. I understand the Department
of Justice is planning to get around this problem by making single
statutes available for downloading via FTP, but this has not yet
been implemented.
My elaboration on some of the difficulties should not cause Internet
users to lose sight of the fact that they have been provided with
a powerful search tool, enabling retrieval of the proverbial "needle
in the haystack". It is worth making the effort to take
full advantage of all its features.
Finally, when weighing the pros and cons, it must always be
borne in mind that when dealing with the Internet congestion is
often the norm, servers go down, connections get broken, etc.
Even with a 28.8 kbps modem, a search can sometimes be frustratingly
slow and even time-out before completion. On the other hand for
the occasional user, the law of the land is available and it is
free. At this point in time, I hesitate to ask for more.
Judith M. Bird, "The Statutes of Canada on the Internet
[Review]," Government Information in Canada/Information
gouvernementale au Canada, Vol. 2, no. 4.4 (spring 1996).
http://www.usask.ca/library/gic/v2n4/bird/bird.html
[3] The Government of Quebec, for example, has
recently made available via Internet the Règlements du
Québec (Quebec Regulations), to be followed shortly by the
Lois refondues du Québec (Revised Statutes of
Quebec). However, in order to access anything other than the index, it
is necessary to pay either an annual subscription fee of $495, or a unit
price of $5 per regulation.
[4] Ed Hicks, "Battle of the Formats: CD-ROM vs. World
Wide Web," CSALT Review, Vol. 9, no. 2, p. 12-14.
The Nitty Gritty
Searching
Table of Contents
Query
Displaying Results
Displaying Text of Consecutive Hits
Displaying Hits from the Table of Contents
Additional Points
Navigating and the Reference Window
Graphics
Second Language Version
Printing and Downloading
Conclusion
Notes
[1] May be cited as/On peut citer comme suit:
Judith M. Bird
inTeger acTif
Information Technology Education Group / Associés-conseil
Technologies de l'information et formation
Toronto / Montréal
(514) 487-0559
(514) 487-0625 FAX
jbird@accent.net