Judith M. Bird, The Statutes of Canada on the Internet
Government Information in Canada/Information gouvernementale au Canada, Volume 2, number/numéro 4 (spring/printemps 1996)

Review / Compte rendu

The Statutes of Canada on the Internet 1

Judith M. Bird, inTeger acTif 2


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 Nitty Gritty

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.

Searching

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.

Table of Contents

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.

Query

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).

Displaying Results

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:

Displaying Text of Consecutive Hits

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.

Displaying Hits from the Table of Contents

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.

Additional Points

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.

Navigating and the Reference Window

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").

Graphics

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]".

Second Language Version

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.

Printing and Downloading

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.

Conclusion

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.


Notes

[1] May be cited as/On peut citer comme suit:

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

[2]

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

[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.


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