Rolling change and solid roots

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In serving Canadians for more than a century and a half, the Canada Gazette gives any citizen, even in the most remote part of the country, a voice in government decisions that may affect him or her.

Though it is referred to as one publication, the Canada Gazette is published in three parts. Part I comes out every Saturday and contains general notices, official appointments and proposed federal regulations. Part II is published every second Wednesday and details new regulations. Part III publishes all public acts and their enactment proclamations and is printed irregularly, usually when there are enough acts to warrant an issue (three to four times a year).

The Canada Gazette gives every person an equal opportunity to read a proposed regulation for the first time. Regulations are intended controls on an activity, product or commodity because health or safety is in question. Publication in the Canada Gazette is the last step before a regulation is enacted. Since 1986, the federal government has made it policy to prepublish proposed regulations in Part I of the Canada Gazette, giving citizens the opportunity to present their views and concerns on a specific issue.

The last decade of the 20^th century represented a significant time of challenge and opportunity for the production of the Canada Gazette. Throughout this period of rolling change, one ideology remained in focus: the team would have to develop new approaches to enhance its services while maintaining its roots as an official gazette of the Government of Canada.

A period of challenge and opportunity
for the Canada Gazette Directorate

The Canada Gazette Directorate, formerly known as the Canada Gazette Section, is part of Communication Canada. The Directorate is responsible for publishing all three parts of the Canada Gazette, as well as extra editions and supplements as necessary. It also publishes the required indexes to parts I and II.

In 1983, the Clerk of the Privy Council established a committee to review the operations of the Canada Gazette Directorate. Through this review, the Canada Gazette's increase in volume and cost received particular attention. In fact, the volume of printed pages had tripled in less than 10 years, and the costs had increased by almost tenfold during this same period.

It was subsequently recommended and adopted that the Canada Gazette Directorate operate on a cost recovery basis, ending a tradition of free publication services that lasted more than 100 years. On April 1, 1986, government and private sector clients began to pay to publish notices in the Canada Gazette and, citizens, to subscribe to the printed copy.

An efficiency study conducted in 1987 recommended that all functions for the Canada Gazette Directorate be integrated. At that time, the composition division and the editing division were physically distant from one another. The separation meant that, in a given week, documents might have had to be manually exchanged up to 500 or more times. This created a situation in which the Directorate had minimal operational control over the complete production process, though it remained ultimately responsible for timely delivery of the newspaper. On April 1, 1989, the two functional divisions, together with the administration division were combined to form the new Canada Gazette Section.

In 1989, to improve efficiency and make better use of new technologies, clients were encouraged by way of a special discount to send their notices both in print and on diskettes. This reduced substantially the need to input text and helped respect the tight publication deadlines.

Some old traditions get left behind

Modernizing the official newspaper's publishing environment necessitated the placement of some antiquated procedures into the history books of the Canada Gazette. For instance, the production team would no longer rely on pressurized air tubes to whisk copy between editors and composition experts on two different floors of the Office of the Queen's Printer in Hull, Quebec. Shared accommodations between editing and composition divisions eliminated the need for the ancient "work ready" light. For many years, light tables and waxing machines were used to lay out the non-text information such as graphics, tables and maps, and paste them in their appropriate space using the Canada Gazette template serving as a guide. It was only in 1996 that the Directorate changed computer software that enabled the use of electronic graphic files. Today, this equipment is used on rare occasions, when all other electronic options have failed.

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NOTICE:
The format of the electronic version of this issue of the Canada Gazette was modified in order to be compatible with extensible hypertext markup language (XHTML 1.0 Strict).