justicecanada/laws-lois-xml: The consolidated Acts and regulations of Canada. Des lois et règlements codifiés du Canada.

Justice Canada (or, more specifically, Andrew Pressey, to his enormous credit) has been quietly archiving Canadian “legs and regs” to GitHub for about a year and a half.

These have long been available in XML (e.g., XML for the Financial Administration Act), but storing them in GitHub allows for: easy tracking of change over time (changes are tracked in Git! though, of course, some of these changes might be to the XML, not actually to the law itself—that’s a whole other issue to get into); a huge head-start on computational analysis projects (no more scraping required, Jason, we can just clone the repo and go!).

Splendid to see.

7:12 pm on August 2, 2022