BC Laws & Legislative Documents -- Now Comprehensive and Free on the Web

British Columbia laws and legislative documents, once available only in the content-rich and highly functional but subscription-based service called QP LegalEze, is now available to everyone free on the web in a new service called BC Laws. We congratulate the BC Queen's Printer on this exciting development, another landmark example of Canadian leadership in the open law and open data movements.

BC Laws has been upgraded to provide enhanced searching and more content including historical legislation and related publications. All content is delivered in an “open data format” and restrictions on commercial and non-commercial use of the data have been changed (read more). Contents, all full-text searchable, include:

Access to the BC Gazette, Parts 1 & 2, as well as Point-in-Time tables for all statutes, are coming soon.

If freer access to primary law were not good enough, the content on BC Laws – all of it – is delivered as open data, under a Queen’s Printer License. The license enables, among other activities, full and partial content reuse and publication for commercial and non-commercial purposes, subject to appropriate conditions. To this end, the Queen’s Printer has also released access to the API underlying BC Laws.

Thanks to our colleague Kim Nayyer at the University of Victoria, Diana M. Priestly Law Library, for bringing this to our attention.