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2.  THE WORKING ENVIRONMENT

Legislative Editing and Publishing Services is comprised of two units: the Legislative Editing Office and the Database Management Services (formerly the Statute Revision Commission).

The Legislative Editing Office provides French and English revising services and paralegal support to the drafters in both the Legislation Section and the Regulations Section.  The Office reviews all government bills as they proceed through Parliament to ensure that each reprint accurately reflects committee amendments.  It maintains the only indexed set of master copies of federal statutes and regulations and prepares and oversees the printing of the regular volumes of the Statutes of Canada and Part III of the Canada Gazette, among other matters.

The Database Management Services maintains the database of consolidated Acts and Regulations, which is used to produce office consolidations and a CD-ROM.

The members of the Jurilinguistic Services unit are specialists in legal language.  Their primary role is to help drafters achieve the highest possible quality of language when drafting bills or regulations.  They advise drafters on language issues, focusing on style, terminology and phraseology.  They also revise drafts from a comparative perspective to help ensure that the French and English language versions of bills and regulations are parallel in meaning.  As discussed elsewhere in this report, the roles of jurilinguists in French and English and the extent of their involvement in the legislative drafting process, differ.

The Informatics Services unit provides computer-related support services to the Legislative Services Branch.  It is the centre of all photocomposition, coding and publishing activities for draft Government Bills and for the publications of the Legislative Editing Office and Database Management Services.  Recently, this unit has been largely occupied with the introduction of LIMS, an advanced technology system that will coordinate the coding and formatting of legislation among the Department of Justice, the House of Commons, the Senate, and the Canada Gazette.  It will also allow for the publication of documents in different formats.

Revisors and jurilinguists work with both the Legislative and Regulations Sections.  The nature of the work done by drafters in each of the sections differs, with consequent differences in the roles and responsibilities of the revisors and jurilinguists.

The work of statutory drafters is based on instructions that accompany the Memorandum to Cabinet authorizing the draft.  In the past, departments, in all cases, provided the Regulations Section with draft regulations; comparatively little original drafting was done in the Section.  This situation has now changed, with drafting instructions being provided to the drafters more and more often.  The vetting and advisory role of counsel in the Regulations Section is thus shifting increasingly to a drafting role coupled with the advisory function that they have always performed.

The same pools of revisors and jurilinguists serve both the Legislative and Regulations Sections.  There is a constantly shifting balance in the allocation of their services.  At times, the greater need may be for terminological expertise in the preparation of technical regulations.  At other times, the demand may be for application of their linguistic skills to ensure that the texts of long and complex bills and regulations are internally coherent and linguistically consistent.  Departments are highly variable in the extent to which they provide the appropriate degree of support in both official languages to the Branch's drafting of both statutes and regulations.  The quality of the materials submitted by departments and their capacity to interact with Branch counsel in both official languages plays a major role in determining the nature and extent of services required of both revisors and jurilinguists.  Often, departments are providing French text that has been translated by non-specialist translators from an original English version.  This can increase the need for assistance from French language revisors and jurilinguists to revise the text.  The drafters' reliance on revisors and jurilinguists also varies from project to project in accordance with the preferences of the individual drafters.

 

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