See the law as it was: point-in-time Canadian legislative history

Every practising lawyer has hit the same wall. A file turns on what a statute said then, on the day the contract was signed, the day the offence occurred, the day the benefit was denied, but every official source shows you only what the law says now. Reconstructing the past means digging through annual statute volumes, chasing amending acts, cross-referencing coming-into-force dates, and assembling a version of the section that no single page will ever display for you. It is slow, it is easy to get wrong, and it is exactly the kind of work a computer should be doing.

Today it does. Legislative History is live in the CourtStairs sidebar: a point-in-time explorer for Canadian law. Read any section as it stood on any date, see every version it has been through, diff two versions word for word, and trace each change back to the act or regulation that caused it.

The coverage, in numbers

This is the real corpus, not a sample.

Where the official sites give you a single consolidated snapshot, CourtStairs gives you the whole timeline.

"What did the law say then?"

Pick a date. The section renders as it was in force on that day, with no version math and no PDF archaeology. Drag the slider back and the text changes under your cursor.

"What exactly changed?"

One click produces a lawyer-style redline between any version and the one before it: added words in green, removed words struck through in red. This is the part no official source will do for you, not even justice.gc.ca diffs its own text, and it turns a dense amending act into an instant, readable answer to the only question that matters: what actually moved?

"How often, and when, has it changed?"

A visual timeline shows every version and its in-force window. Some sections are placid. Some are anything but.

You see that pace at a glance, then click any band to read that version or diff it against its neighbour.

"Is this still law? Which instrument did it?"

Every section carries its in-force or repealed status, its first-in-force date, and its complete amendment history. Each entry is tied to the amending instrument and links out to the citation and title of the act or regulation responsible, right down to the bill (for example SC 2019, c. 25, better known as Bill C-75). The chain from today's text back to its origin is always one click away.

And for everyday work it browses like the official consolidations you already trust: full-text search, an A to Z index, filters by jurisdiction and type, sections in reading order with their complete text, or re-sorted by "most changed" when you want to find the live wires in a statute.

Why it matters

The bottom line

Official sources answer one question: what is the law now? Legislative History answers the ones that actually decide files: what was it then, what changed, when, and who changed it. It does that in seconds, with a link you can share. Open any statute in the sidebar, drag the date back, and watch the law move.