a2aj/canadian-laws

A2AJ Canadian Laws

Last updated: 2025-08-10 Maintainer: Access to Algorithmic Justice (A2AJ)

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Dataset Summary

The A2AJ Canadian Laws dataset provides bulk, open-access full-text legislation and regulations from Canada. Each row corresponds to a single law or regulation and contains the English and French versions where both are publicly available. The project builds on an earlier version that was maintained by the Refugee Law Lab (RLL) and is now maintained by A2AJ, a research project co-hosted by York University's Osgoode Hall Law School and Toronto Metropolitan University's Lincoln Alexander School of Law. The dataset is intended to support empirical legal research, legal-tech prototyping, and language-model pre-training in the public interest—especially work that advances access to justice for marginalised and low-income communities.

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Dataset Structure (~ 5k documents)

Code	Type	First document - Last document	Rows
LEGISLATION-FED	Federal Legislation (Acts)	1870-05-12 – 2025-06-26	954
REGULATIONS-FED	Federal Regulations	1945-12-21 – 2025-07-16	4,803

Note: Counts are approximate and will drift as the dataset is updated.

Data Fields

Field	Type	Description
dataset	string	Type identifier (LEGISLATION-FED or REGULATIONS-FED)
citation_en / citation_fr	string	Primary citation in English / French
citation2_en / citation2_fr	string	Secondary citation(s) where available
name_en / name_fr	string	Title of the law or regulation
document_date_en / document_date_fr	datetime64[ns, UTC]	Date of the document
source_url_en / source_url_fr	string	Source URL for the official XML version
scraped_timestamp_en / scraped_timestamp_fr	datetime64[ns, UTC]	Timestamp when the page was scraped
unofficial_text_en / unofficial_text_fr	string	Full unofficial text of the law/regulation
unofficial_sections_en / unofficial_sections_fr	string	JSON string containing structured sections of the document
`upstream_license'	string	License of the upstream source

Missing values are represented as empty strings ("") or NaN.

Data Languages

Where available, rows include both English and French texts. Where only one language is published, the fields for the other language are empty.

Data Splits

All rows are provided in a single train split.

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Data Loading

from datasets import load_dataset
import pandas as pd

# load specific type of laws (e.g. Federal Legislation)
laws = load_dataset("a2aj/canadian-laws", data_dir = "LEGISLATION-FED", split="train")

## ALTERNATIVELY
## load the entire corpus
# laws = load_dataset("a2aj/canadian-laws", split="train")

# convert to df
df = laws.to_pandas()
df.head(5)

The dataset is also offered in Parquet format for fast local use. Files are in subfolders with the dataset type names.

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Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

Building on open government initiatives, A2AJ is collecting and sharing Canadian legal data to:

• democratise access to Canadian legislation and regulations;
• enable large-scale empirical legal studies; and
• support responsible AI development for the justice sector.

Source Data & Normalisation

Laws and regulations are sourced from the Justice Canada Laws-Lois XML repository on GitHub, which contains official legislative data published by the Government of Canada. The XML files are parsed and normalised into a structured format with minimal processing (XML to plain text, cleanup, section parsing).

Personal & Sensitive Information

Legislation and regulations are public documents that do not typically include personal or sensitive information.

Non-Official Versions & Disclaimer

The texts here are unofficial copies derived from online source. For authoritative versions, consult the URLs in source_url_en / source_url_fr or visit the Justice Laws Website.

Non-Affiliation / Endorsement

A2AJ and this dataset are not affiliated with, nor endorsed by, the Government of Canada or Justice Canada.

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Considerations for Using the Data

• Social Impact. Open legal data can reduce information asymmetries but should be used responsibly to ensure that derivative tools advance—rather than undermine—access to justice.
• Currency. Laws and regulations are living documents that change over time. This dataset represents a snapshot and may not reflect the most current versions. Always verify against official sources for legal purposes.
• Completeness. The dataset currently focuses on federal legislation and regulations.

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Licensing Information

The code used to create the dataset by the A2AJ and any work on the dataset undertaken by the A2AJ is subject to an open source MIT license.

Users must also comply with upstream licenses found in the upstream_license field in the dataset for each document, which reflects the licenses through which the A2AJ obtained the document. These upstream licenses may include limits on commercial use, as well as other limitations.

The A2AJ is committed to open source methodologies, and we are actively working to obtain more permissive licenses for all data we collect.

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Warranties / Representations

While we make best efforts to ensure the completeness and accuracy of our datasets, we provide no warranties regarding completeness or accuracy. The data were collected through automated processes and may contain errors. Always verify documents against the official source.

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Dataset Curators

• Sean Rehaag - Co-Director, A2AJ
• Simon Wallace - Co-Director, A2AJ
• Contact: [email protected]

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Citation

Sean Rehaag & Simon Wallace, "A2AJ Canadian Laws" (2025), online: Hugging Face Datasets https://huggingface.co/datasets/a2aj/canadian-laws.

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Acknowledgements

This research output is supported in part by funding from the Law Foundation of Ontario and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, by in-kind compute from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada and by administrative support from the Centre for Refugee Studies, the Refugee Law Lab, and Osgoode Hall Law School. We also thank Justice Canada for maintaining the open XML repository of federal laws and regulations.