Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Statutes and regulations are generally uploaded once a month from the Websites of official publishers. Thus, the date of the "last update" of a legislative text corresponds neither to the date of assent nor to the date the text came into effect, but to the date of the most recent upload by CanLII. For users' convenience, CanLII also keeps and publishes the versions of such texts as they were uploaded on earlier dates. The earlier versions can be a valuable point of departure for establishing the previous state of legislative texts, though they are sometimes identical.

Recent decisions are generally published on the Website two working days after they are distributed by their issuing court and tribunal and received by CanLII. In some cases, however, there can be delays owing to processing problems or legal restrictions on publication.

No. CanLII does not perform a triage of decisions on the basis of substance or importance. CanLII aims at posting all written decisions distributed by courts and tribunals. That said, many decisions issued orally will never be distributed in a written format. This often happens in certain criminal cases for instance, when verdict decisions are rendered by a jury, without written reasons. Please also note that CanLII abides by applicable rules respecting publication restrictions and for this reason may delay publication of some decisions in order to comply with temporary bans on publication.

Given current law, the documents published by CanLII have no official status. However, the documents published on CanLII are routinely used for professional purposes and are accepted by the great majority of courts to assess the state of the law. This said, CanLII publishes the documents for users' convenience only, and provides no guarantees relating to use of the documents it publishes despite the care taken in their preparation.

If CanLII's databases lack an important decision, you can notify us using the feedback form by providing the required details.

The CanLII citation provides you with an easy way to refer to decisions on CanLII. It is always posted clearly in the header of every decision published on CanLII.

The most efficient means of finding a statute or a regulation is to use the search engine. If you know that the scope of your search is limited to federal, provincial or territorial law, it is worth your while to navigate to the search template for the corresponding database of legislation. Note that if you are searching within a provincial or territorial resources page, you can expand the scope of your search to the federal databases so as to seek law applicable to that province or territory.

If you know the text's citation, input a few terms appearing in the title and, if applicable, its year of publication or chapter number in field 2 of the search template. For example, to find the Energy Efficiency Act, SNB 1992, c E-9.11, begin by entering only its alphanumerical citation: SNB 1992, c E-9.11. If you have only the title, enter only the important words: energy efficiency. It is wiser to enter only the most important words in the title because sometimes the titles of pieces of legislation made available on the sites of official publishers have been shortened or changed for alphabetical sorting purposes or for concision. Thus, it is better not to include terms such as "An Act–", "An Act Respecting–" or "An Act to Establish a–" in your query when you are looking for a specific enactment.

If you are looking for legislative texts relating to a specific topic, you can begin by entering in field 2 of the template a word or expression likely to be found in the title of the documents you are looking for. Next, you can use the full text search in field 1 to look for terms or combinations of terms that might be in the relevant pieces of legislation or regulations.

If you know which court rendered the decision you are seeking, you should navigate to the court's presentation page, especially if the decision is recent: it may be in the list of recent decisions and you may be able to access it directly. On the court's presentation page, a search template allows you to find the decision easily using the information you already have.

If you know the decision's citation, enter its CanLII citation, neutral citation or a citation of a law report supported by RefLex, in field 2 of the search template. For example, to find the decision McMahon v. Canada (Attorney General), 2005 FCA 33 (CanLII), you should begin by entering only the citation without the case name or "style of cause": 2005 FCA 33. If you have only the case name, enter only the important words: mcmahon canada. It is wiser to enter only the important words because some case name may vary from one publisher to the next.

You can also find a decision using other information or a combination of pieces of information. The docket number can be entered in field 2, and the date or period in which the decision was rendered can be entered in the date field. If you know the name of one of the parties, or of a judge or lawyer involved in the case, you enter it in field 1 to perform a full text search.

Finally, if you are looking for decisions relating to a specific legal issue or factual question, you should use the full text search in field 1, and enter terms or combinations of terms likely to appear in relevant decisions.

A number of users liked to be able to browse through alphabetical lists of decisions in a preceding version of CanLII. The lists are no longer available on the site, but you can produce similar lists using the search engine. Here is how: navigate to the page of the court of tribunal that is of interest to you. On the search template, type the beginning of the name you are looking for in field 2 "Statute name / case name / citation / docket number". Enter at least three letters, followed by the wildcard character (*). For example, on the Supreme Court of Canada's page, cha* in field 2 and then launch the search. You can sort the results by date to make it easier to find the decision you are looking for.

If you still have too many results, you can easily refine your search by specifying the approximate period in which the decision in question was probably rendered by entering the decision year in field 3 of the search template, for example, 2005 in both boxes, or for a longer period, 2001 and 2004. When you specify only the year of decision, it is interpreted in the following way: a year indicating the beginning of the period is interpreted as January 1 of that year; a year indicating the end of a period is interpreted as December 31 of that year. Naturally, you can also narrow your search by adding words in field 1 to indicate terms that should appear in the full text of the decision you want to find.

In order to provide you with a list of results that best meets your needs, the search engine processes your query so as to include the most common variations, such as plural forms, and exclude very common words, such as articles and pronouns.

However, you can change this function if you wish. To include only the exact terms and no variations, use the operator EXACT( ) as in EXACT(preferences). If you are looking for an expression in which there is a very common word, you can place the expression between quotation marks, as in "duty of care". You can also combine both operators at once to limit the search to exact terms and include common words, as in EXACT("duty of care").

Yes, in compliance with applicable Law and its Privacy policy, CanLII does gather personal information on users of its Website, for the sole purpose of establishing statistics on use and of improving its services.

Generally, no. In Canada, information appearing in court cases is a matter of public record. The law sometimes makes exceptions to this principle by imposing various permanent or temporary restrictions on publication of information, by either legislative provision or court order. CanLII scrupulously complies with such legal restrictions, with the collaboration of the courts and other institutions that provide it with decisions.

Requests concerning the content of documents published on the CanLII site should be submitted to CanLII's Editor, using the feedback form. Requests that decisions be withdrawn or redacted will be studied in light of applicable rules concerning publication restrictions. Your request will be refused if it is not justified by relevant legislative provisions or a court order restricting publication. If you wish to submit a request for withdrawal but do not know the law that applies to your situation, you should first consult a lawyer or the registry of the court or tribunal that issued the decision in question.

In order to minimize the impact of decision publication on individuals' privacy, CanLII does not allow external web robots to index decisions published on its Website. In practice, this prevents people from finding a decision on CanLII by querying an individual's name using a general search engine. However, when a third party links to a CanLII decision on a web page that is not under CanLII’s control, names that are included in this page or in the link’s text might still be indexed by external search engines. Neither CanLII nor its partners represent or guarantee that the technological and legal measures taken to prevent external indexing will be respected or be free of mistakes or malfunctions.

Yes, you may establish hypertext links to any page of the CanLII Website. However, under our terms of use, it is prohibited to do so in such a way as to create confusion or make it appear that the hyperlinked document does not come from the CanLII Website.

CanLII wants to encourage publication of law as much as possible, whether it is for personal, academic or commercial purposes. Under our terms of use, you can therefore reproduce, print and distribute any of the legal documents – statutes, regulations or decisions – published on the CanLII Website free of charge and without any other authorization from CanLII, provided that CanLII is identified as the source of the document. This includes editorial enhancements added by CanLII, such as hypertext links and information in page headers and footers.

However, use of legal documents published by CanLII can be subject to additional conditions imposed by some courts and government bodies, which claim intellectual property rights over the documents. CanLII tries to indicate the existence of such additional conditions on the pages of the databases concerned, but you remain responsible for checking whether your planned use of a document is authorized.

Please note that, so far, the terms of use of documents from federal bodies are the most liberal. Indeed, under the Reproduction of Federal Law Order, "Anyone may, without charge or request for permission, reproduce enactments and consolidations of enactments of the Government of Canada, and decisions and reasons for decisions of federally-constituted courts and administrative tribunals, provided due diligence is exercised in ensuring the accuracy of the materials reproduced and the reproduction is not represented as an official version."