Professor Adam Dodek is the Chair of CanLII and Francis Barragan is the President and CEO of CanLII.
The Rule of Law is like the oxygen in the air: we don’t notice it until we are having trouble breathing. Today, we watch as Americans struggle to breathe as the Rule of Law is under threat. It is time for all Canadian legal organizations to take stock and reinforce our protections of the Rule of Law.
Here in Canada, most Canadians likely either do not know or may not appreciate the role that CanLII plays in maintaining the Rule of Law in our country.
In the Quebec Secession Reference (1998), the Supreme Court of Canada identified the Rule of Law as one of the unwritten constitutional principles which serve as the “lifeblood of our Constitution”. The Court explained that “At its most basic level, the rule of law vouchsafes to the citizens and residents of the country a stable, predictable and ordered society in which to conduct their affairs. It provides a shield for individuals from arbitrary state action.”[1]
The Court articulated three elements of the rule of law.
- “the rule of law provides that the law is supreme over the acts of both government and private persons. There is, in short, one law for all”.
- “the rule of law requires the creation and maintenance of an actual order of positive laws which preserves and embodies the more general principle of normative order”.
- “the exercise of all public power must find its ultimate source in a legal rule . . . . Put another way, the relationship between the state and the individual must be regulated by law.”[2]
CanLII knits these elements of the Rule of Law together. It ensures that “the actual order of positive laws” is maintained. Those positive laws are created by the Parliament of Canada, provincial and territorial legislatures, federal and provincial cabinets, other regulation making authorities and judges at all levels of courts across the country – in all, more than 350 various sources of positive law that CanLII collects and curates.
CanLII was the brainchild of Canada’s law societies at the end of the last century. It is owned by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada and funded by Canada’s 14 law societies – that is by Canada’s more than 140,000 lawyers and notaries. It is truly “Our CanLII”.
CanLII is the only fully publicly available source for the corpus of positive law in Canada. It has spent close to 25 years securing and curating primary law in Canada to build an open access database that is comprehensive and reliable. This Canadian creation is the envy of open access legal sites around the world.
CanLII offers comprehensive no-cost access to Canadian law 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year – thanks to Lexum – the CanLII-owned Canadian tech company that constructs and maintains the website and its database. It is an essential resource for legal professionals, scholars, students, and the general public in accessing justice.
CanLII.org experiences significant user engagement, with an average of approximately 840,000 unique visitors accessing the site each month – more than 23 million visits in 2024.
CanLII thus actualizes the third element of the rule of law: that the exercise of all public power must find its ultimate source in a legal rule. CanLII not only enables but also empowers individuals to access the law. It realizes the principle that the relationship between the state and the individual is regulated by law.
As CanLII Board member, former Ambassador and former Blackberry Vice-President, Randolph Mank is known to say, “as the repository of Canadian law, CanLII represents a vital national asset for our country.”
CanLII is committed to its values of open access, comprehensiveness, reliability and ease of user access. We will continue to protect and promote the Rule of Law in Canada by ensuring the law is accessible to all Canadians.
_Professor Adam Dodek is the Chair of CanLII and Me Francis Barragan is the President and CEO of CanLII.
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[1] Reference re Secession of Quebec, [1998] 2 SCR 217 at para 70.
[2] Ibid. at para 71.
