Bclaws Ca 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.

Install Jentic One Beta

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.

Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.

Step 1: 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

Step 2: 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}

GET STARTED

Start building with BC Laws API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

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 Jentic?

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

Credential isolation

BC Laws is unauthenticated public data, so there are no secrets to store. Requests still run through your own Jentic One instance so the agent reaches the right endpoint by intent rather than scraping the BC Laws website.

Intent-based discovery

Agents search Jentic by intent such as 'search BC laws' or 'fetch a BC laws document as XML', and Jentic returns the matching BC Laws operation with its parameter schema so the agent calls the right endpoint without browsing the website.

Time to first call

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.

Can I limit what my agent is allowed to do with the BC Laws API?

Yes. Because Jentic One is self-hosted, you run the instance and your own rules decide which BC Laws operations the agent may call, so you can allow only what it needs, such as full-text search across an aspect with GET /search/{aspectId}/fullsearch or fetching a document with GET /document/id/{aspectId}/{civixIndexId}/{civixDocumentId}. BC Laws is read-only public data with the aspect and document IDs in the URL path, so there are no write operations to expose and no credentials to hand over. You keep the agent scoped to the exact browse, search, and document-retrieval calls you approve.