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Canadian Law / Lois canadiennes - Markdown

A pipeline that converts official Canadian federal legislation from XML to clean, structured Markdown — optimized for readability, versioning, and AI consumption.

Browse the Index

Data Source

Source: justicecanada/laws-lois-xml — Government of Canada consolidated federal laws and regulations in XML format.

Structure

laws/
  INDEX.md              # Root index with counts and links
  en/
    acts/               # ~956 federal acts in English
      INDEX.md          # Sortable table of all acts
    regulations/        # ~4845 federal regulations in English
      INDEX.md
  fr/
    lois/               # ~956 lois federales en francais
      INDEX.md
    reglements/         # ~4845 reglements federaux en francais
      INDEX.md

Files are named with their chapter/instrument number and a slugified title: A-1-access-to-information-act.md, SOR-2007-151-mv-sonia-remission-order-2007.md

Each file includes:

  • YAML frontmatter (title, chapter number, language, type, last amended date)
  • Hierarchical heading structure (# title, ## parts, ### sections)
  • Definitions with bold defined terms
  • Numbered subsections, paragraphs, subparagraphs, and clauses
  • Tables, formulas, schedules
  • Historical notes in collapsible <details> blocks

Automated Updates

A GitHub Actions workflow runs weekly (Sundays at midnight UTC) to:

  1. Pull the latest changes from justicecanada/laws-lois-xml
  2. Incrementally convert only changed XML files to Markdown
  3. Regenerate all index files
  4. Commit and push any updates

The workflow can also be triggered manually from the Actions tab. Use the "Force full reconversion" option to regenerate all files.

Local Usage

# Clone this repo
git clone https://github.com/XYOca/laws-lois-markdown.git
cd laws-lois-markdown

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run conversion (incremental - only processes changes since last run)
python scripts/convert.py

# Force full reconversion
python scripts/convert.py --force

# Custom directories
python scripts/convert.py --output-dir ./my-output --data-dir ./my-data

Why Markdown?

Problem Solution
XML is hard to read Clean, structured Markdown
No clean diffs Git versioning shows exactly what changed
Not AI-ready Normalized structure with frontmatter metadata
Hard to search Plain text, grep-friendly

License

The source legislation data is published by the Government of Canada. This conversion tool is open source.