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Last update: 27 November, 2001.
This is the first spot to check and see what's new amongst my law pages. Essentially what you will find here is news of importance to the archive, such as additions or deletions, or even re-organizations of the hierarchy. Further information about the history of the archive can be found at the bottom of this page.
Please also note: If the server isn't responding to your queries or document requests, it's probably because I am updating them!
Newfoundland? It doesn't exist. But the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador does, at least according to a new amendment to the constitution changing the name of that province.
The Newfoundland Act has been updated as a consequence.
Made a link to Craig Walsh's web page about the creation of the province of New Brunswick.
Thanks to John L. Whelan for pointing out that the Newfoundland Act was lacking an amended Term 17.
The World Wide Web Consortium web site has some excellent HTML hacker tools to ferret-out subtle HTML and link errors. As a consequence, there were many fixes.
Changed a reference to the now defunct
www.ontariospeaks.com
web site.
Added a link to Chan Robles and Associates, which includes, among other things, "the full text of the Philippine Constitution, laws, statutes and codes,Supreme Court decisions."
Added the Constitution Act, 1999 (Nunavut) which made changes to the Constitution Act, 1867.
Added the Constitution Amendment, 1997 (Quebec) which allowed Quebec to reorganize its school system.
Added and updated the Mexican Constitution, plus fixed several outdated links related to Mexican Legsilation and Laws on the home page.
Thanks to Wallace J. McClean for suggesting a slight change to the description of the Adjacent Territories Order on the main page. It was not made clear that Newfoundland was not included in the description.
Fixed a broken link on the Legal resources page regarding Israeli Law Links.
Added the Reference regarding the Secession of Quebec
Added the Constitution Amendment Proclamation, 1998 (Newfoundland Act), which once again repeals and replaces Term 17 of the Newfoundland Act.
Added the Constitution Act, 1999 (Nunavut), which adds one Senator and one Member of the House of Commons to represent the new Territory of Nunavut.
Also increases the number of Senators from 112 to 113.
Updated the Constitution Act, 1867
Duh, duh, duh. Thanks to Joanne Stephenson, for pointing out that I had forgotten to build internal links to the footnotes of the Constitution Act, 1982. Also checked and repaired other internal links in the Constitution Act, 1867.
Decided to add some more explanations all over the place, far too many to list here.
Added Bill C-39, which includes the impending Constitution Act, 1999 (Nunavut) as Part II.
Moved the Bill which was passed last year that created a self-imposed Constitutional amending formula on the Canadian Parliament, under the Miscellaneous section of the Canadian Constitutional Documents section.
Added some more pointers to the UNAM InfoJus WWW server.
Created a special page to try to alleviate the amount of email I get.
Added the famous exchange between Former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard of 2 years ago in the Arguments section of the Canadian Constitutional Documents web site.
Thanks to Shauna Longstreet, for pointing out an error on the Constitution of Canada page regarding the year the last amendment was made (it was 1997, not 1993).
Got rid of some stale links and cleaned up the HTML a bit in the Canadian Constitution section. Removed the Table of documents to force people to read, not just blindly collect.
Added the Rupert's Land and North-Western Territory Order....actually it has been there for a long time, but for some reason didn't get put into the page....
Revised and added some prose to the site.
Revised the Manitoba Act, 1870, after some typos were discovered.
Added a bit to the Miscellaneous page of the Canadian Constitutional Documents section in relation to the Manitoba Boundaries Extension Act, 1881.
Rewrote many meta tags to ccomodate the use of abstracts under some search engines.
Added a blurb in the Canadian Constitution page about the existance of the office of Prime Minister under the Constitution Act, 1982.
Removed references to the search engine used by this site, since it is no longer available. It will return, one day.
Added "The Calgary Framework", an effort by the English-based provinces to create discussion on Canadian Unity. Interesting I should get this today, while the threat of a Postal Strike looms. There's a bit of irony here though. Canada Post was regarded in the same way as CBC was before CBC's creation: A national institution vital for ensuring Canada's unity and identity. What symmetry!
Added the proposed amemdment from Quebec that would allow it to abolish denominational schools and create schoolboards based on linguistic divisions.
Added an Arguments page, listing a few documents that have been made for or against constitutional proposals overtime.
Added the latest wording of the proposed replacement for Term 17 of the Newfoundland Act, as found in the Nefoundland and Labrador government's news release.
Updated the Legal Resources Page.
Added a Committee Report page to some of the reports available here. (That section had always been there, and was being referred to by other sections of the archive, but until now wasn't public.)
Added a link to Wallace J. McLean's very nice Newfoundland and Labrador Documents page to a new page devoted to provincial legal documents.
Vive La France!
Increased verbosity on some of the pages.
Added the Charter establishing the Hudson's Bay Company.
Added Treaty No. 8 to the Canadian Aboriginal legal materials section. (Both documents courtesy of David Chapman.)
Added the Constitution Amendment Proclamation, 1997 (Newfoundland Act), updated the Newfoundland Act, the Table of Constitutional Documents, the footnotes of the Constitution Act, 1867, the Proposals page and the Home Page. It's a wonder they didn't amend something else.
Fixed another handful of typos.
Updated the Constitution Act, 1867 and the Constitution Act, 1982 to include newer references to other Acts.
Cleaned the Archive's home page of any dead links and such.
Finally, the complete version of the Treaty of Paris, 1763 is now online.
It seems that there's a popular (albeit silent, but it's there in the logs) demand to have the NAFTA and GATT documents searchable. So they're back. The GATT documents are also available in Adobe pdf format.
Added "A Time for Action", a 1978 government paper tabled by Pierre E. Trudeau outlining the importance of patriation and laying out its process and timetable.
Updated the Table of Constitutional Documents.
Added the proposed amendment to the Constitution Act, 1867, by Quebec to create school boards based on linguistic difference. English and French.
Cleaned the Constitution Act, 1867 file. Also continued marking up the footnotes to that Act, and added a few other annotations.
Fixed a technical error in the title of Rupert's Land and North-Western Territory Order.
Hmmmm.....I wonder what happened to the other copy of the Constitution Act, 1985 (Representation) that I had....it's back anyway.
Spruced-up the Constitution Act, 1982 and added extra markup to the footnotes.
Sigh. It wasn't until I started to use the Codigo Civil de Mexico that I started to find more and more errors. Started a major clean-up of this now....
Started updating and cleaning up my legal resources page.
This Archive has actually been around since 4 July, 1994. The first bits and pieces ever in place were the BNA Act 1867 and the resources page. The Codigo Civil de Mexico, as of 1994, was put in place around May 1995. After that, the archive really expanded to its present state.
In fact, here's more on that, from a recent reply to a query:
The site started off with one document, back in 1994. The document in question was the British North America Act [1867] (Canada's early 'constitution'). I wanted to do this because copies were circulating that were either incomplete or incorrect.After that, the site took on a life of its own, and it has been an on-going hobby of mine. (I actually work in the data-communications/computer field.)
As for the selections, it wasn't deliberate. I started to centralize, very early in the site's life, what was available on WWW (again around 1994, early 1995) as well as make available documents I had come accross personally (por exemplo, El Codigo Civil de Mexico - de que edad, yo no sabe).
Anyways, I think people began to independently discover the idea that many documents like these could become available, freely. Over time, other sites sprang up and devoted their energies to specific areas of international and constitutional law - better than I could. So my efforts have gradually evolved to concentrate on the Canadian Constitution, and bits and pieces of Canadian aboriginal law, plus a couple of things related to Mexico.