Perhaps long overdue, the E-laws Ontario website for provincial legislation has revamped its user interface in favour of a more modern and accessible look and feel. Fortunately, the new interface is much cleaner and easier to navigate; unfortunately, not all of the valuable content made the transfer.
So what’s new for you? You can now Browse or Search current or source law conveniently by selecting the tab on the left-hand sidebar. An advanced search is now available, through which you can use boolean operators (AND/OR, etc.). A full explanation of the advanced search operators can be found here. Point-in-time legislation is also available back to January 2, 2004, and previous versions are now linked on the statute/regulation pages themselves.
The Table of Public Statutes and Responsible Ministers has moved, and is accessible from the ‘Legislative Tables’ link on the homepage. Unfortunate casualties of the migration were the Detailed Legislative History tables, which provided legislative history information for each statute by provision number and which are no longer available. As these tables were the primary reason I used e-Laws previously, for now there will be little motivation for me to use the new site over CanLII, which houses much of the same content.
Speaking of which, the CanLII site administrators have also notified its users that there will be a slight delay in updating the site with Ontario law, as they work to interface with the new e-Laws. No document versions will be missed and they are working to resolve the issue.
As always, if you have any difficulty or have any questions, let us know!