Consolidated Statutes and Regulations

Legislative Services Branch
284 Wellington Street, SAT-4
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0H8

The Consolidated Statutes and Regulations site is a directory of legislation drafted for various federal departments and agencies. If you have questions or comments about the interpretation or the applicability of these statutes, you can contact the Department, agency or crown corporation responsible for the specific statute or regulation, or contact the government hotline 1-800 O Canada (1-800 622-6232). You can determine the Minister responsible for a statute and any associated regulations in the Table of Public Statutes and Responsible Ministers. (Please note that the terms "statute" and "act" or "Act" mean the same thing.)

Many visitors to our Web site contact us asking for legal assistance or research. The Department of Justice cannot address such specific requests. Our mission is to provide counsel and legal services to the Government of Canada and to client departments and agencies. For additional guidance, you may wish to consult our Frequently Asked Questions about statutes and other legislative documents.

The documents comprising the Consolidated Statutes and Regulations are reproduced in HTML only and are not available in PDF. If you have problems printing, we may be able to suggest ways to overcome these difficulties. Documents can be reproduced in accordance with the Reproduction of Federal Law Order. To include a link to a particular section of a consolidated statute or regulation in one of your web pages, consult the following guides:

Before a Statute becomes law, having received its third reading in the House of Commons, Senate approval and Royal assent, a proposed bill can be followed through the legislative process with the help of the Hansard Index. Bills are usually prefixed by the letter "C" if they were introduced in the House of Commons or the letter "S" if they were first introduced in the Senate.

For additional information on other sources for these legislative documents, you should consult our important note. The Consolidated Statutes and Regulations site is updated approximately every four months usually in April, August and December, though the volume of updates can cause delays. Each update is about 4 months old when posted, so for example the update current to April 30 would usually be posted in August. The non-consolidated legislation is published in the Canada Gazette.

The Department of Justice is developing a new system for processing legislation which will improve the delivery of federal legislation on on the Internet. It is planned for public availability in the Fall of 2005. For this reason, updates to the existing site may be affected.

If you wish to contact other key parts of the Department of Justice Canada, please go to the Contact Us homepage.