British Columbia Statutes

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Copyright © 1995-2008 Catherine P. Best
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	Statute revisions
	Citing a statute
	Finding statutory provisions
	Finding amendments
	Finding legislative history

Statute revisions

Every 15 to 20 years, a revision of the BC statutes takes place. Revisions have occurred in 1996, 1979, 1960, 1948, 1936, 1924, 1911, 1897, 1888, 1877, and 1871. The purpose of a revision is to consolidate all amendments to the statutes since the last revision, and to improve the statutes by making non-substantive changes in wording, style and organisation. The mandate of the revision committee, and the effect of the revision, is set out in the Statute Revision Act, R.S.B.C. 1996, c. 440.

When a revision occurs, names of statutes may change. Chapter and section numbering almost always changes. A concordance is prepared to make the transition to the new revision easier.

Citing a statute

The citation for a statute varies depending on whether you are citing to a revision, or to a sessional volume. If you are citing to section 5 of chapter 484 of the 1996 revision, the citation is:

Water Protection Act, R.S.B.C. 1996, c. 484, s. 5.

If you are citing to the version of that Act that was passed in 1995, prior to the 1996 revision, the citation is:

Water Protection Act, S.B.C. 1995, c. 34, s. 5.

There are several significant changes. Instead of R.S.B.C. (for Revised Statutes of British Columbia) you use S.B.C. (for Statutes of British Columbia). The year and chapter number are both different. In this case the section number is the same, but often the section numbering will change in a revision.

There is often confusion about whether you need to cite all amendments when you cite a statutory provision. The Interpretation Act provides that any citation to an enactment in legislation is deemed to include all amendments to that enactment. The Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation provides that citations are presumed to be to the statute as amended. It is therefore not necessary to include amendment information. However, if the amendment is relevant to a point being discussed, it should be cited.

Finding statutory provisions

There are many different tools for locating relevant statutory provisions. These include:

	conducting an electronic search of the text of the statutes
	reviewing text books, encyclopedias and periodical articles on your topic
	reviewing CCH publications or other commercial statutes compilations on your topic, which often have detailed indices
	finding references to statutory provisions within relevant cases
	scanning the names of the statutes

There are several electronic versions of the BC statutes, which can be used for full text searches of the statutes.

QP LegalEze: This Internet-based subscription product contains the 1996 revision and regulations. It uses a more powerful search engine than the free version, and is kept current. Subscribers receive various other value-added features.

Queen's Printer free access to the statutes: The Queen's Printer website contains the 1996 revision and regulations. This material is updated infrequently and therefore you must check for amendments.

Quicklaw: Quicklaw publishes the 1996 revision, with regulations, in British Columbia Statutes and Regulations. It is very current, with point in time and detailed legislative history information. Quicklaw also publishes the 1979 revision, in BC Historical Legislation.

LawSource: LawSource publishes the 1996 revision with an incomplete collection of regulations.

Quickscribe: Quickscribe publishes the 1996 revision, with regulations, on-line. It also offers two value-added features to the general public. QuickScribe publishes the BC Legislation Portal, which lists daily updates to British Columbia legislation. From that site, persons can subscribe without charge to RSS feeds for particular Acts, and will be notified when the specified legislation is amended.

Dart: British Columbia Statute Service is published by Canada Law Book on-line. It includes a full text consolidation of the Revised Statutes of British Columbia 1996 and Regulations, with legislative history and amendments, annotations of British Columbia and Supreme Court of Canada decisions interpreting the statutes, links to Western Legal Publications' case digests, links to full text judgments, cross-references, and a Table of Statutes.

Finding amendments

Once you have located a statutory provision, you must ensure that it is current. There are a variety of ways to find amendments to a BC statute since the last revision.

The revision itself is updated periodically to include amendments passed during earlier legislative sessions. Your first step should be to check the date to which the consolidation you are using is current. If you are using an electronic version of the statutes, always check the scope note for the electronic version. It may be no more current than the print version, or even less current. The most current electronic versions are the Quicklaw version, and the QPLegalEze version.

If you are using a less current version, such as the free Queen's Printer site or an older print copy of the legislation, then you must check for amendments.

The easiest method is to check the BC Legislative Digest for each legislative session since your copy of the statute was consolidated. Look up the statute in the Title Index, and then check any bills listed as amending the statute. A copy of the bill will be available from the Legislative Assembly website. The summary sheet for the bill located under the Bills Tab in the BC Legislative Digest should indicate whether and when the bill comes into force.

Alternatively, find out if your library has access to QP LegalEze. If so, check the Table of Legislative Changes in that service for the statute in question. You can also obtain a current consolidation of the statute using QP LegalEze.

If you do not have access to any of these tools, then you can search the full text of the bills on the Legislative Assembly website to find references to the relevant Act, and then check the Provisions in Force information to find out whether the relevant legislation is in force. If the "in force" information is not current, contact the BC Courthouse Library for assistance.

Finding legislative history

To conduct effective research, and particularly to look for judicial consideration of a statutory provision, you need to know its prior year, chapter, and section numbers. You can usually obtain this information (back to the last revision) from historical notes at the end of each section of the revised statutes. This is the system employed in all prior BC revisions and in other Canadian jurisdictions. However, the 1996 revision as published by the Queen's Printer includes this information in a separate table at the end of each Act. The version published by Quicklaw still includes this information at the end of each section.

The historical reference will appear in a year-chapter-section format. For example, 1979-38-2 refers to section 2 of Chapter 38 of the 1979 revision. This legislative history information is published in QP LegalEze and with the free Queen's Printer version of the 1996 revision. To see legislative history information about a statute, locate the statute in the alphabetical listing, then click on the Historical Table link for the statute. The Historical Table will include a reference to the section from the previous revision, as well as any amendments up to the 1996 revision coming into force. There is also a separate table of legislative changes showing amendments since the 1996 revision came into force.

If you want to trace the references to a statutory provision back to the 1960 revision, you would look in the 1996 notes to find the 1979 section number, and in the 1979 notes to find the 1960 section number. If there are references to amendments between revisions, you find these by looking in the sessional volume for the year of the amendment. For example, a reference to 1985-2-18 refers you to section 18 of Chapter 2 in the sessional volume for 1985.

To dig further into the legislative history of the provision, look for Hansard debates of the bill while it was in the process of being enacted. Hansard can be searched back to 1970 on the Legislative Assembly website. Hansard references are also included in the Progress of Bills tables for legislation back to 1999, and on the summary sheet for each bill in the BC Legislative Digest.