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Researching the Statutes of British Columbia

Statute revisions

Every 15 to 20 years, a revision of the BC statutes takes place. The last revision occurred in 1996. 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.

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, Quickscribe consolidations, or other commercial statutes compilations on your topic, which may 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 and regulations.

BCLaws free access to the statutes: BCLaws.ca contains the 1996 revision and regulations. This consolidation is current to within 7-14 days. However, the search engine is very rudimentary and no tables of legislative changes are included.

CanLII free access to the statutes: CanLII.org contains the 1996 revision and regulations, with amendments back to January 2009. It is updated weekly from the BCLaws.ca site. The legislation can be searched in full text, and earlier versions can be compared side-by-side with later versions to identify changes made during amendments. There is a note-up feature but it is not comprehensive. Users can subscribe to RSS feeds to be notified of changes to legislation.

QP LegalEze: QP LegalEze is an Internet-based subscription product containing the 1996 revision and regulations. It uses a more powerful search engine than BCLaws.ca. It contains a searchable current consolidation of the British Columbia statutes and regulations, and also publishes orders-in-council, legislative history tables, bills, Hansard, consolidated in force information, regulations bulletins, the full text of private Acts, archived versions of earlier consolidations, BC Gazette Parts I and II, and corporate registry notices.

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. QuickCite includes judicial consideration of legislation back to 1992.

LawSource: LawSource publishes the 1996 revision with an incomplete collection of regulations. KeyCite includes judicial consideration of legislation with extensive historical coverage.

Quickscribe: Quickscribe Online publishes the 1996 revision with regulations, and includes a number of value-added features to help subscribers navigate through bills, orders-in-council, current and archived versions of BC legislation. Quickscribe also includes alert services to notify users of legislative changes.

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.
  • 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. It will list amendments and provide information about whether and when the amendments came into force.
  • Alternatively, check the BC Legislative Digest for the relevant legislative sessions. 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 when the bill comes into force.
  • To receive notification of amendments to BC legislation, subscribe to an RSS feed. CanLII and Quickscribe allow you to subscribe to a feed for an individual statute or regulation, or for all amendments. QP LegalEze also provides an RSS feed that will notify you of all amendments to BC legislation.

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 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 separate tables in QP LegalEze and in the print consolidation of the legislation, and directly under the section by commercial publishers such as Quicklaw and Quickscribe. To see legislative history information about a statute on QP LegalEze, 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 are also separate tables 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.

Full text electronic access to BC legislation from 1868-1995 is available to in-library users at Courthouse Libraries BC. Access is through the library catalogue. Courthouse Libraries BC also contains print copies of previous consolidations and sessional volumes. QP LegalEze makes available a limited range of previous consolidations. The statute consolidations go back to 1991 and the regulation consolidations go back to 2003.

To dig further into the legislative history of a 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.

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.