It seems coverage varies between the provinces, but it is fairly extensive thus far and the quality of the pdf scans in HeinOnline are always top notch. Ontario in particular looks to have everything back to 1867. For those needing to do historical legislative research from the comfort of their own office desks, this is excellent news!
Ontario lawyers have free remote access to HeinOnline through the Law Society. Email us for your password!
We always keep our eyes out for little-known or used sites that might assist in legal research, which we will feature in our new series: “Sites Unseen”. First up to the plate:
Hands-down one of the most time-consuming legal research tasks is legislative research; that is, trying to trace the law to find out what it looked like in a certain year, updating it with amendments, finding copies of older orders-in-council, etc. It is mostly time-consuming because if you are interested in a year prior to the early 2000s, very little is available online and you will mostly be working with the bulky print volumes of statutes or regulations.
Fortunately, the Osgoode Law School at York University has made considerable strides in assisting in this area and now offers pdfs of Ontario Annual Statutes back to 1970, and Ontario Revised Statutes back to 1914. What is even better, as can be seen below (click to enlarge), is they are broken down into separate pdfs and fully browsable by the individual acts (goodbye 400+ page pdfs!):
Statutes are fully browsable by Act
So if you need a copy of an older Ontario Act, bookmark this site and have a look! I use it constantly in my legislative research here, even just to to get a cleaner-looking scan of a particular Act.
