 Hi, this is Linda. Welcome to the NCLA Government Resources Section Help on an Accidental Government Information Library and Webinar Series, or Help for Short. Thank you for coming. So today's webinar is an introduction to researching Canadian federal documents. And our presenter today is Nicholas Warby, who is the Government Information and Statistics Librarian at the University of Toronto. He provides reference and instruction for domestic and international government documents and statistics. And he oversees the collection development for government information and coordinates the university's web archiving program. So thank you very much, Nicholas. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to talk to what I assume is mostly an American audience about Canadian federal material. First off, I wanted to give an overview of some of our institutions, for those of you who aren't familiar with Canadian politics, and for those of you who are, apologies if it seems a bit like a high school civics class. I'm going to cover finding current and historical material from our House of Commons and Senate and other parliamentary material like Royal Commissions and Sessional Papers. I'd like to talk a bit about our Library of Parliament, which is somewhat analogous to the U.S. Congressional Research Service. And finally, I'll touch briefly on executive and departmental material as well as our depository system and some of the distinct challenges government information faces in Canada at the moment. I'll try my best to answer your questions in the chat as they come up. And apologies if there's a little bit of a delay with that. I've also linked my slides. They'll be linked in another slide at the end. So let's start by looking at the Canadian federal government from the top down. So at the top is our constitution. Our last constitution was passed in 1982 when it was repatriated from the UK. It enacted the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and sets out the roles of our executive, judicial, legislative branches of government. And most importantly, from a research perspective, it describes the division of powers between our federal and provincial governments. So if a researcher comes to you with a question about Canadian policy, you may need to look at material from the provinces depending on the topic. Some topics like Indigenous natural resource rights may span a number of different jurisdictions, and there's going to be overlapping provincial and federal jurisdiction, different departments that you'll need to look at for this area. I'm just going to circumscribe myself to looking at federal stuff for the next 30 or so minutes. But our provincial governments for the most part are structured in a similar fashion with the same sort of documentary outputs and institutions. Okay, so this is probably the most recognizable face in Canadian politics right now. It's our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. You may see him representing Canada at meetings of the heads of state like the G7, but is he your head of state? The issue is a little bit more complex and a simple yes or no, and that comes out of our history. So Canada is a constitutional monarchy with Elizabeth II as the head of state. If you've ever come here and had some Canadian money, her face is on the front, that's why. Her representative in Canada is Julie Payette, our current Governor General. And the Governor General is mostly a ceremonial role which involves giving the throne speech, which is like our State of the Union address, signing bills into law, which we call Royal Assent, and summoning Parliament after an election, swearing in the PM and Cabinet, dissolving Parliament on the advice of the Prime Minister before an election, or after a failed confidence vote. A vote of no confidence is triggered if government can't pass the budget, or if a motion is brought forward in the House that the government has lost the confidence of the House to lead. So if the Prime Minister loses the confidence vote, they have to resign, and the Governor General can call an election or invite another contingent within Parliament to form government. That's pretty rare, and the Governor General is selected based on the advice of the ruling Prime Minister, but they're supposed to be impartial in all of this. Like the U.S. Congress, Canada has an upper House, the Senate, and a lower House, the House of Commons. Also like the U.S., bills need to pass through both chambers. However, there's a few distinctions. Both the Senate and House can introduce bills. However, the Senate can't introduce bills that call for new taxes or appropriations, and the House of Commons is an elected body. Its representation is by the number of seats that's determined by more or less the size of population of different writings. The Senate, on the other hand, is appointed by Prime Ministers with no fixed term limits beyond a mandatory retirement age of 75. About 47% of the current Senate is made up of Trudeau appointees and 35 of the previous Prime Minister Harper's appointees. There's also a big contingent of Senators without party affiliation at the moment. The Senate tries to achieve balanced regional representation by the provinces, and that's not necessarily tied to representation of total population. So to give you an example, Ontario has 22% of allocated Senate seats despite having about 40% of the Canadian population. There's been a lot of calls for Senate reform. I don't have time to get into it, but the idea was for the Senate to be a check on the power of the population, which is represented through the House of Commons. It's also referred to as our legislative sober second thought. Most legislation in Canada is sponsored and introduced in the House of Commons, and the majority of legislation is drafted by the cabinet, which comprises Canada's executive branch. So cabinet ministers are appointed by the Prime Minister to head different portfolios or departments, which are the ministries that execute Canadian government programs. Appointment doesn't require any sort of confirmation hearings, and there are comparatively few explicit rules about its composition. There's general conventions, so Prime Ministers will try to get some sort of regional slash provincial balance, as well as a gender balance in the composition of cabinets. Cabinet ministers are mostly members of Parliament from the House of Commons, although there's typically one senator in each cabinet. The Prime Minister, him or herself, typically runs for a seat in the House of Commons. We don't have quite the same separation between the executive and legislative branches of government like in the U.S. The PM is active in the House of Commons, active in debates on the floor, responding to questions, which are a really great source of research material. That all said, some of our processes look pretty familiar or should look pretty familiar to an American. We basically have the same stages for a bill to become a law. The key difference is at the end, instead of a presidential signature or a president vetoing a bill, the Governor General signs a bill to give it a royal assent. The Governor General can veto or choose not to sign a bill or leave that decision up to the British monarch, but neither of those things have really happened since the 19th century. I just want to quickly talk about some terminology before discussing where to actually find some of this stuff. Our legislative terminology is fairly consistent with the U.S. A law is a bill until it's passed, and then it becomes an act or a statute. We have public laws that originate with cabinet, which are the majority of all the bills in all houses. We also have private member bills, which are introduced by other members of the Senate and House outside of cabinet. We use acts pretty interchangeably with statutes. From what I understand, our definition of regulations are pretty consistent with the U.S. Since we have no president, we don't have executive orders. Instead, we have orders and counsel, which are made by the Governor General on the advice of cabinet. So where do you find these things? That really depends on what you're looking for and when you're looking. There isn't a consistent tool that gives you access to everything, and that's public or commercial. For acts, the practice has been for parliament to publish all of the acts that have received royal assent in a year in the annual acts of the Parliament of Canada. Each act is published in order that it was passed and given a chronological chapter number. So when you're looking at citations of Canadian acts, you see a little lowercase c and a number at the end of the title of the act. You can access the acts of Parliament of Canada publication freely through a tool called Early Canadian Online, which also includes the Pre-Confederation Acts, and also the Internet Archive going forward. For stuff post-2000, for acts, you can use the annual Statutes tool on the Department of Justice website. The Department of Justice website also has a number of other handy tools. So for looking at things that are currently enforced, you could use the Consolidated Acts. And you could also use the same tool to view previous versions of the same act going back to the early 2000s. You can do the same thing with regulations, looking at the Consolidated Regulations tool. But viewing previous versions of acts and regulations earlier than 2000 is kind of a nightmare. For acts, it requires the use of the Table of Public Statutes and the annual acts of the Parliament of Canada, and then checking for amendments going backwards or forwards each year. This guide from Simon Fraser University, which is linked at the bottom of the page, goes into more depth in doing this type of work if you're interested. The Canada Gazette is another critical tool. It's kind of similar to the U.S. Federal Register. So it contains new acts, new regulations, proposed regulations, and orders and counsel. You should be able to find it freely online before Confederation to present through both the Gazette website and Library and Archives Canada. So back to orders and counsel. They're again like the Canadian equivalents of U.S. Executive Orders. They're not debated in Parliament before they're enacted, and they can cover a lot of things really important to Canadian history. For example, it was through an order and counsel that Canada declared war on Germany, and later another order and counsel that was used to strip many people of Japanese dissent of citizenship. Orders and counsel were also used to dispossess some indigenous peoples of their land. The order and counsel on the screen here, which you probably can't read very well, was the order and counsel that barred immigration from Canada from Canada's World War I enemies following the war. You can find contemporary orders and counsel online through the Privy Council Office database. Some historical orders and counsel are also available through Library and Archives Canada. And you can check for all of them going backwards and forwards through Part 2 of the Canada Gazette. For bills, you can find contemporary legislation from about 2001 to present through Legis Info. And I'll just run through a quick little demo with it. It's a pretty straightforward tool that enables you to – it links together the text of the bills throughout all stages of the House and the Senate, as well as the transcripts of the debates where it was discussed, votes, and committee material and more. So by default, it's set to look at the most recent Parliament and session. So if you want to search for something, you'd have to use the search on the left. So I'm just going to pop open the advanced search. So let's say we're interested in finding all bills passed and present that have passed through both houses that mention climate change. To do that search, you'd make sure that you have title and content selected underneath the search field. Canadian bills have short titles and long titles that may not always be descriptive of their content. Very often things can get buried in very large budget bills. So I always select title and content so that I can – so search the title of the bill in addition to any of the clauses. And to limit bills that have passed through both houses, you could use the status facet here. You could either select a waiting royal assent, so things that haven't been signed or royal assent received. Just for our purposes, I'm going to select royal assent received. There's other facets in here to limit to political party sponsors, time frames, individual sponsors. Just going to do a quick search. So when you look through the results here, you'll notice that there's a bunch of entries with green Cs and numerical characters. These refer to the fact that they were introduced in the House of Commons. So you see a C. If it was introduced in the Senate, it would have an S. And the number is the order in which it was introduced in the session in that particular chamber. So if you see a Canadian news article talking about Bill C86, that just happens to be the 86th bill introduced in the House of Commons in that session. So if you follow up on a reference from two years ago, it's really important to make sure you're searching for the right parliament in session. These numbers get reused every session. So if an election gets called while a bill is being discussed, the process stops. If a bill gets reintroduced in a new session after the election, it's going to get a new number. That's why it's really important to at least get a short title and a date from a citation. So I'm just going to select C57 here. The entries for these bills are fairly easy to use. In the top right hyperlinked there, you can get a copy of all versions of the bill as it moves through the various stages. If you expand the sittings underneath each chamber, you should get some hyperlinked dates. These will take you to the transcripts of the debates where the bill was discussed. And there's also detailed voting information linked there. The committee material works pretty much the same. It's pretty easy to access the committee hearings where they heard testimony and debated amendments of a bill clause by clause. You just need to click on the hyperlinked dates. So I'm going to click on meeting 82 and the meetings there just to give you a sense of what these look like. So included in the entries are not just the transcripts of the meeting, but the hearings and the briefs submitted by stakeholder groups who may not necessarily have gone to Ottawa and discussed this bill in person. And to find witness testimony, you just have to expand witnesses to get to their individual transcripts. You just hover your cursor, you click on the microphone icon to get to the full text transcription. And you can see there's a pretty broad range of people that came to discuss this bill, both from government and NGOs and other organizations. I'm just going to hop back to the bill profile. So if you want to do the full span of the bill, you could do the exact same thing with the Senate. There's additional information on the right here. You can get information from the department. So press releases, reading lists that were put together, as well as legislative summaries which are put together by the Library of Parliament, which again is sort of akin to CRS reports on the bill. So it's just hopping back to my slide deck. So going deeper into our House and Senate, the document types we use are pretty similar to U.S. counterparts. Our debates are sometimes referred to as the Hansard, like in the U.K. We have journals which are somewhat like the minutes and lists of decisions and actions that took place in a chamber. They can be used as a really effective index for older publications. Our committee materials are pretty similar to the U.S. Stakeholders and interested parties can submit written briefs to committees considering a piece of legislation or show up in person. These are generally hosted on committee sites, along with the proceedings of the hearings. One general trend you'll notice very quickly is that there isn't a single portal that provides an entry point for all the parliamentary material. The House and Senate produce really similar outputs like bills, debates, and committee material, etc., but you have to access them through separate sites, and even coverage there isn't consistent. The Senate site starts coverage in 1996 and the House in 1994. Canadian parliamentary historical resources addresses this gap by providing free access to the debates, journals, and committee material from confederation until contemporary online coverage starts. The Internet Archive, too, is also a really great resource for digitized Canadian GOV docs that can address and plug some of these gaps left by other tools. So, LEGIS info is great, but it only gets you into material if it's related to a specific bill. To find any other House or Senate material, you have to use their individual sites for contemporary stuff. I'm just going to use a few basic tasks to show you how the inconsistencies between the House and the Senate sites can impact your search. If you're looking for debates or committee material, the path to the publication tool on the House of Common Sites is not where you would logically think it would be like maybe the magnifying glass on the top right-hand side of the page. It's kind of buried. And if you use it, your search results, they're a bit of a mess. You won't get the facets that you find in the publication search that let you limit to different document types. If you need the publication search tool, the way to get there is through the top navigation menu. You click on Parliamentary Business, then Search Debates or Hansard. Even if you want to search committee material, you need to click on Search Debates or Hansard to get to the publication search. You also need to be mindful of the Parliament and Session in the search refinements. By default, it's set to the current Parliament and Session. And flipping over to the Senate side, on the Senate site, the path to the publication search is simply just the magnifying glass in the top right of the page. If you're looking to search the debates of the Senate, you need to click on the Chamber tab so it's a little different from the House of Commons. Again, you need to be mindful of the Parliament and Session as it defaults to the most current Session. Another critical task where the House and Senate sites can be a bit frustrating for users is searching for witness transcripts and the committee materials. If you're searching for committee meetings, briefs, and hearings to do with a bill, that's something you could easily do with legislative info we saw before. It's all linked in there. However, like in the U.S. Congress, committees do more than just studies of individual bills. Moreover, if you wanted to look at the participation of an individual or an organization in parliamentary committees, you need to look across a wider spectrum of bills and committees. So let's say we wanted to look at the activity of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, which is an oil interest group. We want to see how active they've been in parliamentary committees. The House and Senate sites both have witness search tools that can help facilitate this kind of search, but they work differently and they can't be found in consistent places. So for the House of Commons, it can be found by going to the House site, selecting Parliamentary Business from the top navigation menu like before, but you click on the list of committees and overview from the menu that pops out, and the witness search is at the very bottom of the Committees page. And that'll help you search across the House of Commons committees from roughly 1994 onward. For the Senate, you'd click on the Committees link from the top navigation menu, and you'd select an individual committee. The Witness button is at the bottom of the Individual Committees page, and that'll open up the witness search. Frustratingly, you can only search for witnesses one committee at a time. You may not always know which committees where your witness or your organization has been active. So earlier than 1994 and 1996 for the Senate, historical debates, journals, and committee material can be found through the Library of Parliament and Canadian Parliamentary Historical Resources Tool. It's great, but the primary entry point is the full text search, which can be a bit overwhelming if you're looking for a broad topic like oil or climate change. It also lacks the ability to facet by things like witnesses. So a better strategy might be to first search in something like the journals within this tool, which will give you some contextual information like dates, names of committees, names of bills, etc. There's more to parliamentary materials than just the debate, bills, and committee stuff. In Canada and other countries with Westminster-style governments, we have these things called Royal Commissions, as well as Commissions of Inquiry, which are independent inquiries appointed by cabinet. There's somewhat similar to U.F. presidential committees, sorry, commissions. In Canada, the official inquiries, they're official inquiries into something of national concern. And the point is to usually obtain advice about a problem or inform policymaking or to investigate a specific event. The Commissions of Inquiry and the Royal Commissions have basically the same powers, but the Royal Commissions are higher profile and cover broader subjects. They usually involve cross-country hearings and reports with formal recommendations. Some key Royal Commissions include the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in the 90s, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, and the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the 60s. They're led by experts, and that expert's name is used as like an informal shorthand for the commission. So for example, the Royal Commission on the Future of Healthcare in Canada is sometimes referred to as the Romano Commission after the lead investigator Roy Romano. Both the Royal Commissions and Commissions of Inquiry have the power to subpoena witnesses and to get people to testify under oath. Interested parties can also submit written briefs and testify at the hearings. These are really, really rich sources of research material. You can find final reports through the Privy Council office, Library and Archives Canada hosts an index to all the material related to each commission through its new Aurora search tool. You just have to use a collection code when searching it. And also early Canadiana online host material from the pre-1901 commissions. Sessional papers are also pretty key, especially for historical research in Canada. They're similar to the U.S. Congressional Serial Set. They were documents formally tabled in Parliament for review. They contain things like annual reports, reports of Royal Commissions and Commissions of Inquiry, as well as government responses to committee reports. They predate the founding of our Dominion Bureau of Statistics, so what became Statistics Canada. So the Sessional papers contain census and election returns, trade, transport, agriculture, immigration and other statistical sources that make it really like your go-to starting point for historical research. The Sessional papers were published as a discrete multi-volume set from Confederation until 1925, and afterwards the papers were published separately as serials in most cases, as well as a collection of annual departmental reports. They're kind of tricky to use. You can find the early ones through early Canadiana online until 1900, and afterwards the University of Toronto and the Internet Archive partnered to digitize and provide access to the remaining papers until 1925 with a unique feature of item level, so Sessional paper level description. Our Library of Parliament also produces some really valuable publications. It performs a function similar to the Congressional Research Service, so it gives you those legislative summaries that you find in legislative info, but backgrounders and reports for parliamentarians on a wide range of issues. Thankfully, they're available to the public on their website. I often use Library of Parliament reports for the starting point with students. They're short. They have great references and chronologies of policy and legislative activity. They're awesome for building up context on an issue really quickly. Before I finish, I just wanted to cover a bit of the information available from our executive branch. Published documents from federal departments are generally available on departmental websites and the current iteration of our federal depository program. Unpublished documents are typically held by Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa if they've been kept and transferred according to retention schedules. Library and Archives Canada does a great job of digitizing and making contents available, but not everything has been digitized. Material that hasn't made its way to the archives may be available through an access to information and Privacy Act requests, or we call them ATIPS. This is our freedom of information request mechanism. One quirk of the Canadian system that may be shocking to an American is the existence of cabinet confidences. The principle behind this is that cabinet needs to be able to have frank closed door discussions in the policy formation phase and eventually come to a consensus and presents a united front to the country. Access to information and Privacy Act, so these two acts exempt cabinet meetings, cabinet papers, communication among cabinet ministers, reports, draft legislation, and other material for 20 years under cabinet confidences clauses. Afterwards, cabinet material may be available at Library and Archives Canada. Online, we only have limited access to cabinet conclusions, which are just the minutes and decisions. We too have a depository program, but it has drastically changed in the last five years. Our depository program, which centrally distributed print government publications to libraries through Public Access, only began in 1927 after some pretty persistent lobbying on the behalf of librarians. Instead of a piece of legislation like Title 44 in the U.S., the program is started by an Ordering Council, which again is kind of like an executive order. Right now, it's governed by a policy created by the Treasury Board Secretariat, and it's not legislatively protected in the same way that it is in the U.S. under Title 44. Our print depository program ended in 2014. Currently, the depository services program collects, digitizes, catalogs, provides mark records, and hosts PDF documents from the Canadian government. Our current depository system and the management of federal government information leaves a lot to be desired. The Treasury Board Secretary, its publishing guidelines don't really have a strong set of enforcement measures. For example, it's the heads of communication of government departments that are responsible for keeping track of publications and ensuring that they successfully submit everything to publications in Canada, so our electronic depository. There's no real independent oversight or any explicit punishment for non-compliance. It's really easy for departments to just publish documents to the web and not tell their head of communications. That's why it's hard to track. Fugitives are a significant issue. The scope of the current mandate of our electronic depository service is mostly PDF and EPUB formats. That excludes vast swaps of information like HTML pages, news releases, databases, and other ephemeral material, so that necessitates web archiving and other initiatives that I'm happy to talk about in the question and answer period. The depository services program mandate also doesn't cover some organizations like Crown Corporation, which are politically independent state-owned enterprises here. Some examples are the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, our passenger rail service via rail. Unlike in the U.S. where government materials are in the public domain, copyright to Canadian government material is owned by the Crown. Crown copyright is something that really hasn't been updated in like a century. Prior to 2014, the depository services program managed copyright clearance for government documents. Now that's done by individual departments often inconsistently. This adds an extra layer of frustration for institutions wanting to engage in digitization programs, but maybe are concerned about solely relying on the fair dealing guidelines of our Copyright Act to do so. There's currently a bill in the House of Commons aimed at addressing Crown copyright. That's Bill C-440, which I'll have linked here if you want to check it out. These are some additional resources that can help you understand the current state of government information in Canada, including a link to Bill C-44. It would be interesting to see where it goes. I've talked for a long time. I'm happy to take your questions at this point. And I do have my slides linked there if you want to follow up on anything I said. Thank you very much, Mrs. I have a question you can wait for people to chat in. So if you want to chat in your questions, just go through that right now. Sure. But could you talk a little bit about the situation? That's really interesting to hear from. Yeah. I'm not the institutional expert on that here. My colleague, Sam Shin Lee, oversees a project that reports fugitive documents to Publications Canada, so our depository program. So I'm stumbling over my words. So the Treasury Board Secretariat guidelines for publishing outlines what should be in scope of our electronic depository. But it's up to communication managers to provide them an index of everything that was published in the year. Those are often incomplete. So there might be items missing metadata that haven't been added to the repository. It's often librarians that are reporting this to Publications Canada, who will then thankfully catalog stuff and add it to the repository. I don't have any statistics on the extensive non-compliance. I'm not sure if it actually exists, but fugitives are a really big issue. And yeah, if I can remember, I might follow up with an article or two to share with you that can explain the situation much better than I can. Okay. No, that's great. But is there a big movement in the community? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's spearheaded by the Canadian Government Information and Digital Preservation Network, which is a confederation of mostly academic government information librarians in the country that back up everything from the Publications Canada repository and box boxes and are engaged in fugitive reporting. Great. Awesome. Thank you. We have actually a few questions. Yeah. According to the Depository Program on the horizon, I'm not part of the Library Advisory Committee for the Depository Services Program. So I'm not privy to all of that information. I will say something that's pretty scary about that program is that it can change with any new administration. It doesn't have to be passed through the House of Commons or Senate. There are Treasury Board Secretariat guidelines, which are just executive department changes that can happen at any time. So it's pretty fragile. We have an election coming up in the fall, which if our current Prime Minister is unseated, there might be a new information management regime on the horizon depending on the priorities of the person in power. And that will impact metadata distribution. We get mark records through a weekly checklist, and there's also knowledge bases that people can subscribe to, to download to your own OPAC. Crown Copyright. Sorry, did I answer your question regarding the Depository Program? I feel like I'm just talking into the ether. Cool. Crown Copyright. So our government documents aren't in the public domain. The Crown, so in the definition, basically the Canadian government, so not necessarily the Queen, owns Copyright. Technically, we should ask for permission if we want to reproduce something. They've changed it. If we wanted to republish a bill or something, it should be covered under our Fair Dealing Guidelines. But if we're a pretty risk adverse and don't want to rely on fair dealing, typically you would go to the Depository Services Program to get copyright clearance. Following the changes to the Depository Services Program in 2014, that responsibility was devolved to individual departments. So they're responsible for giving copyright clearance to their own stuff. That's not been handled consistently from what I understand. So it's an additional pain. The bill that's in the House of Commons has only passed the first reading. It was a private member's bill, so it's not something that cabinet has put forward. So I'm not sure what's going to happen there, or if it'll even get any further than the first reading. I would check out the Legis Info profile of the bill and check back with that in the next few months as things roll through the current parliamentary session. You can only go as far back as 2001 using Legis Info. So anything earlier than 2001, you could use Canadian parliamentary historical resources to get the debates, committee material, et cetera. There's also an annual publication for both the Senate and the House that would contain the bills. Yeah, the Senate website and the House websites were updated fairly recently. That's a good question. I don't know if they're exempt from the common-looking field, but yeah, you're right. Most Canadian web pages have a very distinct template. They're not templated websites. I don't have an answer to that, but it's incredibly frustrating because it does happen every few years, and we have to relearn pathways to all the documents that we need. I definitely want to follow up on that, though. Great questions, everybody. Are there any more questions? Thank you so much, Nicholas. This has been really helpful. Yeah, happy to do it. And if you have any further questions, feel free to email me, and I can follow up. I'm definitely not the expert on crowd copyright and fugitives, but I'd be happy to connect you with some of my colleagues who are very active in that space. Great. Well, join me in thanking Nicholas, and I'll have the recording opportunity as possible.