BC Laws

Name: BC Laws API
Brand: BC Laws
Availability: InStock

★ Only Publicly Available OpenAPI DocumentProductivityNote Takingnone7 EndpointsREST

For Agents

Browse and search British Columbia laws, regulations, and government documents through BC Laws. Useful for legal-research agents, civic tooling, and citation lookups.

Connect the BC Laws to your agent

Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the BC Laws, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.

Install Jentic One Beta (Self-Hosted)

Jentic One Host machine

# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh

Agent machine

# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh
jentic register       # connects your agent to your Jentic One instance

Jentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.

Capabilities

What an agent can do with BC Laws API.

Browse top-level content by aspect via GET /content/{aspectId}

Drill into a specific document by aspect and document ID with GET /content/{aspectId}/{civixDocumentId}

Fetch a document with full path identifiers via GET /document/id/{aspectId}/{civixIndexId}/{civixDocumentId}

Retrieve a document's XML representation for structured parsing

GET STARTED

Start building with BC Laws API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

Jentic publishes the only available OpenAPI document for BC Laws, keeping it validated and agent-ready.

BC Laws is the British Columbia government's free electronic library of provincial legislation, hosted by the Queen's Printer. The API exposes navigation and retrieval over the same content set: aspect-based content listings, document fetches by index and document ID, XML-formatted document retrieval, and full-text and document-scoped search. With 7 endpoints, it is a focused legal-research surface suitable for legal-tech tooling, civic apps, and AI agents that need to cite or surface BC statutes and regulations.

Use Cases

Patterns agents use BC Laws API for, with concrete tasks.

★ Legal Research Citation Lookup

Lawyers and paralegals researching BC legislation can use the API to fetch the canonical text of an act or regulation by document ID. GET /document/id/{aspectId}/{civixIndexId}/{civixDocumentId} returns the document and the /xml variant returns a structured representation that can be parsed for sections, subsections, and definitions. The XML form is preferable for any tool generating linked citations.

Call GET /document/id/statreg/96.../00_96.../xml to fetch a specific BC statute as XML and extract section 5(1)

Full-Text Search Across BC Statutes

A civic-tech app surfacing BC laws by topic uses GET /search/{aspectId}/fullsearch to run a full-text query across an entire aspect. The endpoint returns matching documents with snippets, suitable for building a public-facing search UI without scraping the BC Laws website.

Call GET /search/statreg/fullsearch?searchString=rent%20increase to retrieve matching BC tenancy regulations

Document-Scoped Phrase Lookup

Researchers studying a specific act often need to find every occurrence of a phrase within that act. GET /document/id/{aspectId}/{civixIndexId}/{civixDocumentId}/search/{searchString} (and the /xml variant) runs a search bounded to a single document, returning hit locations the client can render as anchored highlights.

Call GET /document/id/statreg/{idx}/{doc}/search/notice to find every section of the act mentioning 'notice'

Agent-Driven Legal Q&A via Jentic

An AI assistant answering BC residents' legal questions can use BC Laws through Jentic to retrieve and cite the actual statutory text. Jentic exposes the 7 BC Laws operations as discoverable tools indexed by intent, so the agent can search, fetch, and quote the canonical legal source rather than guessing.

Search Jentic for 'search bc laws', load the GET /search/{aspectId}/fullsearch schema, execute with the user's query, and quote the matching statute back with a citation

Key Endpoints

7 endpoints — bc laws is the british columbia government's free electronic library of provincial legislation, hosted by the queen's printer.

METHOD

PATH

DESCRIPTION

GET

/content/{aspectId}

Browse content by aspect

GET

/content/{aspectId}/{civixDocumentId}

Browse content by aspect and document ID

GET

/document/id/{aspectId}/{civixIndexId}/{civixDocumentId}

Fetch a document by full identifier path

GET

/document/id/{aspectId}/{civixIndexId}/{civixDocumentId}/xml

Fetch a document as XML

GET

/document/id/{aspectId}/{civixIndexId}/{civixDocumentId}/search/{searchString}

Search within a specific document

GET

/search/{aspectId}/fullsearch

Full-text search across an aspect

GET

/content/{aspectId}

Browse content by aspect

GET

/content/{aspectId}/{civixDocumentId}

Browse content by aspect and document ID

GET

/document/id/{aspectId}/{civixIndexId}/{civixDocumentId}

Fetch a document by full identifier path

GET

/document/id/{aspectId}/{civixIndexId}/{civixDocumentId}/xml

Fetch a document as XML

GET

/document/id/{aspectId}/{civixIndexId}/{civixDocumentId}/search/{searchString}

Search within a specific document

Why though Jentic?

Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.

Credential isolation

BC Laws is unauthenticated public data, so Jentic does not need to manage credentials for this API. Calls still flow through Jentic's discovery and execution layer, so agents reach the right endpoints by intent rather than by scraping the BC Laws website.

Intent-based discovery

Agents search by intent (e.g. 'search bc laws' or 'fetch bc laws document xml') and Jentic returns matching BC Laws operations with their parameter schemas across the 7 available endpoints.

Time to first call

Direct integration: half a day to learn the aspect/index/document path structure and write the search and fetch wrappers. Through Jentic: under 30 minutes — search, load schema, execute.

Related APIs

Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.

Alternative

BBC Nitro API

Different content domain; listed as a content-API peer in the absence of a competing legal-research API

Not a real alternative — listed because the corpus does not contain a competing Canadian or government-legal API.

Complementary

Basesnap API

Database snapshot service — back up the search index that ingests BC Laws content

Use Basesnap when the agent needs to back up a downstream database mirroring BC Laws content.

Complementary

Baseten API

ML model deployment — pair with BC Laws to serve a legal-RAG model trained on BC statutes

Choose Baseten when serving an ML model on top of BC Laws content; BC Laws is the document source.

FAQs

Specific to using BC Laws API through Jentic.

What authentication does the BC Laws API use?

BC Laws is open public-sector data and the OpenAPI spec declares no security scheme — calls to /content, /document, and /search endpoints can be made without credentials. Through Jentic, the API is still routed via the discovery layer so agents can find it by intent.

Can I search BC laws with this API?

Yes. GET /search/{aspectId}/fullsearch runs a full-text search across an aspect (e.g. statreg for statutes and regulations), and the /document/.../search/{searchString} endpoints scope a search to a single document. Both return matches with enough context to render snippets.

How do I fetch a BC statute as XML through Jentic?

Search Jentic for 'fetch bc laws document xml', which surfaces GET /document/id/{aspectId}/{civixIndexId}/{civixDocumentId}/xml. Load the schema, supply the aspect, index, and document IDs, and execute. The XML representation is more reliable for programmatic parsing than the HTML form.

What are the rate limits for the BC Laws API?

The OpenAPI spec does not declare explicit rate limits. BC Laws is provided as a public service by the Queen's Printer, so apply conservative caching and avoid aggressive crawling — most legal documents change rarely, so cached copies are usually safe.

Is the BC Laws API free?

Yes. BC Laws is published by the Government of British Columbia as a free public service. There is no API key requirement and no usage cost, though usage is governed by the BC Laws terms of use.

Can I get the canonical text of a specific BC act?

Yes. Use GET /document/id/{aspectId}/{civixIndexId}/{civixDocumentId} for the rendered document or the /xml variant for structured content. Combine with /content/{aspectId} to discover the index and document IDs for the act you want.