endomorphosis/ipfs_canada_laws

Canada In-Force Federal Legislation (Justice Laws XML)

Research snapshot of in-force Canadian federal Acts and Regulations collected from the official Justice Laws Website XML (Department of Justice Canada). English and French versions are stored as separate rows (language = en / fr).

Not legal advice. Official Justice Laws Website text prevails over this corpus.

Snapshot

Field	Value
Snapshot date	2026-09-02
Coverage	complete in-force federal consolidations listed in Legis.xml
Source	Justice Laws Website XML (Department of Justice Canada)
Collector	scrapers/collect_justice_laws.py
Laws / instruments	11,676
Articles / sections	267,570
Language	English (en) and French (fr)
Jurisdiction	Canada (federal)
License	other (Crown copyright; SI/97-5)

Contents

• data/laws.parquet — one row per instrument (id, title, full text, dates, status, identifiers, article count, source URL). zstd.
• data/articles.parquet — one row per section (law_id, section number, title, text, source URL), linked to a law id. zstd.
• scrapers/collect_justice_laws.py — research collector used to build this snapshot.

License / reuse

Canadian federal statutes and regulations are Crown copyright. Anyone may, without charge or request for permission, reproduce enactments and consolidations of the Government of Canada under the Reproduction of Federal Law Order (SI/97-5), provided due diligence is exercised to ensure accuracy and the reproduction is not represented as an official version.

See:

• https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SI-97-5/FullText.html
• https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/FAQ/

The official Justice Canada GitHub XML dump is also published under the Open Government Licence – Canada.

This dataset is not an official consolidation and is not legal advice. The official Justice Laws Website text prevails.

Source

• Catalog (Acts/Regs XML index): https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/XML/Legis.xml
• English XML: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/XML/
• French XML: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/fra/XML/
• Official bulk dump: https://github.com/justicecanada/laws-lois-xml
• Open Government Portal (bulk XML): https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/ff56de85-f8b9-4719-8dff-ecf362adf0af
• Portal: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/

Notes

Complete relative to the official Legis.xml catalog of consolidated in-force federal Acts (971 × EN+FR = 1,942) and Regulations (4,867 × EN+FR = 9,734). Bodies were read from the Justice Canada bulk XML dump (justicecanada/laws-lois-xml), which is the official bulk distribution of the same files.

2560 instruments have no <Section> split (typically SI/orders); full text is still stored on the laws table.

Provincial and territorial legislation (appended)

Rows with jurisdiction = CA-<PROV> are appended after the unchanged federal rows (jurisdiction = CA). Federal rows, fields and ids are identical to base tip 7e8066f09c8c (never-thin check: PASS). Provincial/territorial law ids are ca-<prov>-<source-id>; article ids are <law_id>-s-<section> (or -sch-<n> for schedules), so they cannot collide with federal ca-en-…/ca-fr-… ids. language = en for all provincial/territorial rows (English text only; for bilingual NT/NU PDFs only the English column was kept). source_type = ca_<prov>_legislation; metadata_json.document_type is statute or regulation. Current consolidations only.

Jurisdiction	Name	Statutes	Statute articles	Regulations	Regulation articles	Laws	Articles	Official source
CA-ON	Ontario	856	31,839	2,217	34,842	3,073	66,681	e-Laws, ontario.ca/laws (JSON/HTML API)
CA-NS	Nova Scotia	586	19,121	1,348	16,853	1,934	35,974	nslegislature.ca consolidated statutes (HTML) + novascotia.ca Registry of Regulations (HTML)
CA-NB	New Brunswick	422	20,156	676	11,459	1,098	31,615	laws.gnb.ca (HTML)
CA-NT	Northwest Territories	239	12,533	569	10,198	808	22,731	justice.gov.nt.ca legislation (bilingual PDF, English column)
CA-NU	Nunavut	223	11,042	396	7,298	619	18,340	nunavutlegislation.ca current consolidations (PDF)
Total sub-national						7,532	175,341
CA (federal, unchanged)	Canada					11,676	267,570	Justice Laws XML

Not collected (blocked / unavailable official sources)

Jurisdiction	Name	Status	Evidence
CA-QC	Québec	BLOCKED_SOURCE	3 consecutive HTTP 403 (CloudFront "Request blocked"): robots.txt 09:24:32 PT, bare-domain robots.txt (redirect to www) 09:24:34 PT, /fr home 09:25:17 PT; stopped, no further requests
CA-BC	British Columbia	BLOCKED	robots.txt (HTTP 200, 09:24:35 PT) allows only Googlebot and Bingbot; "User-agent: * / Disallow: /". Skipped, no content requests
CA-AB	Alberta	BLOCKED	robots.txt (HTTP 200, 09:24:36 PT) "User-agent: * / Disallow: /". Skipped. (open.alberta.ca allows crawling but is not the King's Printer legislation source, so not used)
CA-PE	Prince Edward Island	BLOCKED_SOURCE	robots.txt (HTTP 200) does not disallow /en/legislation, but legislation pages return HTTP 200 with a Radware bot-challenge page instead of content (/en/legislation/all/all/a 09:29:14 PT, /en/legislation 09:29:37 PT). Solving the challenge would be a WAF bypass; stopped
CA-YT	Yukon	BLOCKED_SOURCE	robots.txt (HTTP 200) allows /cms/images/LEGISLATION/, but every page (/cms/, /cms/legislation.html 09:29:50 PT, / 09:29:52 PT) returns HTTP 202 with an sgcaptcha / Cloudflare challenge-platform page; no listing reachable without solving a challenge; stopped
CA-NL	Newfoundland and Labrador	UNAVAILABLE	robots.txt returned HTTP 500 "The page you have accessed is temporarily unavailable." at 09:24:46, ~09:25, 09:28:42, 09:30:29 PT and in the collector listing with backoff 30/60/120/240 s (09:31:57-09:39:28 PT); robots could not be confirmed so no content was requested. Retry later

Known limitations

• Licences differ by jurisdiction and are stricter than the federal SI/97-5 regime. Per jurisdiction (also in each row's license field):
  • CA-ON (Ontario): Open reuse including commercial: the King's Printer for Ontario permits reproduction without permission or charge if reproduced accurately, attributed ('© King's Printer for Ontario, ') and marked as not an official version (https://www.ontario.ca/page/copyright-information).
  • CA-NS (Nova Scotia): Non-commercial only. Reproduction for non-commercial purposes if accurate and attributed; commercial use needs permission (https://nslegislature.ca/legal/copyright). Electronic versions state they are for personal use and may not be copied for resale.
  • CA-NB (New Brunswick): Non-commercial only. Non-commercial reproduction permitted without permission if accurate and the source is identified; commercial redistribution needs the King's/Queen's Printer's written permission.
  • CA-NT (Northwest Territories): Non-commercial only. Non-commercial reproduction permitted if accurate and the GNWT is acknowledged; commercial reproduction needs consent. Consolidations are unofficial.
  • CA-NU (Nunavut): Personal use; no resale without consent of the Territorial Printer. Some consolidations are unofficial and flagged by the source as not up to date.
• Manitoba (CA-MB) and Saskatchewan (CA-SK) were collected but are held out of this dataset pending a licence decision (Manitoba: copies without permission only for study/research, legal proceedings or legal advice; Saskatchewan: reproduction on another website needs a written copyright release from the King's Printer). Their rows are not included here.
• Québec, British Columbia, Alberta, Prince Edward Island and Yukon are blocked at source or by robots.txt, and Newfoundland and Labrador was unavailable (see the table above). No CanLII, mirrors or bot-challenge workarounds were used.
• English only. All provincial/territorial rows have language = en; for bilingual NT/NU PDFs only the English column was kept.
• All provincial/territorial texts are unofficial reproductions of official-site consolidations; the official sites prevail. Not legal advice.
• Ontario: amendments not yet in force (e-Laws Y* paragraphs) are excluded so rows reflect in-force text; numbered paragraphs inside schedules/agreements are stored as schedule articles. The e-Laws search reported 857 current statutes; 856 unique current statutes were listed and collected.
• Nova Scotia: regulations with no numbered sections (orders in council, park/beach designations, protected-area orders) are stored as full text with 0 articles. One listed regulation (reg-sppghostantler, Ghost Antler Nature Reserve) returned HTTP 404 and is missing. The consolidation currency date is not exposed on NS pages, so date is null for NS rows.
• Northwest Territories and Nunavut texts come from PDF (pdftotext). Section splitting is heuristic (line-start numbering with a monotonic filter); marginal notes are interleaved with the body text, tables/forms may be flattened, and some French fragments may remain in bilingual forms.
• Nunavut: one listed instrument (nunavut-criminal-code-review-board-establishment) is a scanned PDF with no text layer and is missing. Several consolidations are flagged by the source as not up to date (see metadata_json.metadata.official_metadata.note).
• Laws with 0 articles keep their full text on the law row (as for federal SI/orders).

Known gaps

• Provincial/territorial coverage is partial; see Provincial and territorial legislation above and Known limitations below.
• Annual statutes as originally enacted, appropriation acts, and point-in-time historical versions are not included (current consolidations only).
• GitHub dump files that are not listed in Legis.xml were not ingested.
• This packaging is a research snapshot, not an official consolidation.