Researching Federal Legislation

Over time, acts and regulations change... Sections get added, sections get amended, and sections get repealed. This meant that historically, in order to understand what a piece of legislation looked like at the current date, researchers had to take the original legislation, and then "cut and paste" all the amendments to it. This, obviously, could be an immensely time consuming and confusing process. Hence, the practice of revisions began:

Periodically, a jurisdiction would take all of the statutes, regulations, or both that were currently in force, and apply all those amendments that had taken place since the legislation originated (or was last revised). The new collection would be re-organized, often alphabetically, each piece of legislation would be renumbered to remove repealed sections/incorporate new sections, and published as a set of bound volumes that would essentially serve as a fresh start. This renumbering process is is why during a legislative history, the chapter and section number for a given clause may change, even if the clause text does not. Federal legislation was revised on a fairly sporadic schedule, with the acts and regulations being revised at different times.

However, thanks to online publication of consolidated law, revisions of the entire body of legislation in any jurisdiction are highly unlikely to ever occur again. The final Revised Statutes of Canada (RSC) was published in 1985. The final revised regulations of Canada, slightly inaccurately named the Consolidated Regulations of Canada (CRC), was in 1978.

Like a revision, consolidated law "folds in" all the amendments since the legislation was made/revised. However, unlike the comprehensive scope of a revision, the consolidation process occurs on an act by act (or regulation by regulation) basis, whenever an amendment comes into force, rather than at a certain point in time. Also unlike a revision, the folding in of amendments does not result in a renumbering of an act, or re-ordering of all the acts.