We had the privilege of interviewing Rachel Jones, Registrar of Regulations for the Government of Nova Scotia. Registrar Jones and her office are working to introduce digital structure (AKN-XML) for the province’s regulations in order to enable “data first” drafting, publication, and management. Many thanks to Hudson Hollister, founder of HData, for leading the interview, which was conducted in March of 2022. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Hudson Hollister
Rachel Jones, Registrar of Regulations for the Province of Nova Scotia, thank you so much for spending some time with us today.
Rachel Jones
Oh, no problem. Great to be here.
HH
First, I would love to ask for a few stories. Could you tell us what brought you into the field of regulation? And then I want to ask about what makes regulation a field distinct from its separate subject areas.
RJ
I’ve been with the province of Nova Scotia with the Office of the Registrar for about 25 years now. So essentially, what brought me to the field was that I saw a job opening, I had an English degree and a law degree. And I thought, that sounds like a good fit. I’ll try that.
And here I am, 25 years later, still working in the field, still trying to modernize things in the field.
HH
I’ve noticed that in some cases, regulatory professionals refer to themselves as regulatory professionals. And in other cases, it really is more up to the subject area. What sorts of conflicts have you experienced between regulation as a particular subject area or discipline–safety, financial, etc.–on the one hand and regulation as a general profession and general subject matter on the other?
RJ
I don’t think we’ve really come across much conflict. Generally, where we work in government, it’s the client departments’ role to deal in the regulatory areas. So they would be dealing with finance and securities and all the rest of the industries that have to abide by those corresponding regulatory schemes.
Our office is within the Department of Justice. We’re more akin to a legislative drafting area. We deal with making sure that the regulations are in the correct form, that they meet the right criteria for drafting that we have set by our office. So we don’t really see that conflict too much.
HH
Great. Tell us a bit more about the work of the Registrar’s office, and about how this type of role came about. Is it common across provinces? Is it common across different forms of government?
RJ
It is quite common across governments. The Registrar’s office does differ a little bit across provinces. Most often you’ll find the Registrar of Regulations as part of a legislative counsel’s office. In our province, the legislative counsel actually reports to the Speaker of the House, and it’s part of the House, not part of the Department of Justice.
This makes it a little bit more difficult when you’re dealing with statutes and regulations that are created by two different distinct bodies. It makes it much more difficult to make sure that they’re in sync, as we have different processes and different software for creating those two types of documents.
The public doesn’t care that it’s two different offices, they just want to see the parliamentary acts and the regulations together. So that’s a little bit challenging, and something we’re still working on.
HH
Tell us about some of the maintenance of the province’s regulations. When you first came into the role, or maybe even when you first came into the office, what was the state of the code and challenges of maintaining a code that reaches across all the different subject areas of government of the province?
RJ
When I first came into the office, we were working with WordPerfect. It was not long after they first started computerizing provincial regulations. Even now, for some of our regulations, the consolidations only go back as far as 1992. Anything before that was paper.
HH
Wow…
RJ
Back then we didn’t even have a standardized [style] to format the documents. When I first joined the Registrar’s office, that was one of the first things that we started implementing: a consistent style, in WordPerfect, across all of our documents.
HH
The need for uniformity–that’s so important! Even the uniformity of style or formatting choices across a whole body of regulations. It’s worth doing even if it is difficult.
RJ
Absolutely. And if you’re using electronic styles, I’m sure you understand, you can change things in one central style document without having to go in and change every single document. But at the beginning, years ago, if the Registrar decided something had to be a different way, we would have to go into every document and change it.
HH
That sounds fun.
RJ
We got to the point where we were starting to argue a lot with the Registrar: why are we changing this? Why do we want to change this now? That’s why we went with centralizing the styles to standardize everything.
HH
And then how about codification? Some jurisdictions don’t have a code at all, but rather everything is just a blob of rules that the lawyers have to sort out? It sounds as though at least there has been a code in place that has been intentionally maintained, is that right?
RJ
Right. In our jurisdiction, we don’t necessarily have a single code like they would in some of the United States. We have various statutes under which regulations are made. So we do have a body of regulations on various different subject matters that we maintain under [their corresponding] statutes.
HH
I’ve occasionally seen a regulation issued under multiple statutes. How do you handle that phenomenon in the current system?
RJ
I actually don’t know that I’ve ever seen one here, under multiple statutes.
HH
When I worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission we would do that constantly. And it was not fun.
RJ
No, I can’t imagine! Securities in Nova Scotia is one of the [subject areas] that doesn’t come through my office. It used to. It was huge, and it was a pain. [Later the securities regulator] decided that they would handle their own regulations, and we were quite happy to have their way. You know, it’s still considered a law under the statute, but it doesn’t come to our office anymore.
HH
This sounds like a good segue to the present. Tell us about your aspiration to adopt digital structure for regulations and what that’ll do.
RJ
[We’ve considered] various different ideas for how we were going to modernize the regulations, probably going back to the early 2000s. The government changed their corporate standard from WordPerfect and into Microsoft Word. So at that point, we said, well, it doesn’t really make sense for us to take our 1,500 documents, plus all of our legacy documents, and just plop them into Microsoft Word.
HH
Oh, yeah.
RJ
And at that time, we were a little leery of Microsoft Word, because you’re all hardcore, WordPerfect fans. At least with WordPerfect, you have reveal codes, and you can kind of figure out when something’s going wonky and take it out of the codes.
But with Microsoft Word, you’re kind of working blind. And it tends to do things for you when you don’t want it to. Even our IT professionals were saying: if you’re dealing with a lot of longer documents, documents that are amended repeatedly over time, Microsoft Word isn’t the best, most stable format for them to be maintained in.
So we thought, okay, let’s look [to maintain regulations in a] format that [is flexible, so] if we move away from Microsoft Word in 10 or 20 years, we don’t have to then migrate again. So that’s when we started looking at SGML, HTML, and XML as formats that would be a lot more stable in terms of not depending on any particular software platform.
HH
With the drawback that they’re less familiar to lawyers.
RJ
Absolutely. That was something that we were also looking at. We wanted to make sure whatever we used as an authoring tool would be easy to use and would have some sort of a WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get] interface for us.
HH
Tell us a bit about how you explained the notion of how XML gives you an underlying digital structure, but you can’t see it the way you can if you maintain regulations in a Word document or in WordPerfect. How have you been able to drive this concept for lawyers, or especially for the regulatory agencies for whom your office is responsible for maintaining and drafting regulations?
RJ
The way our office works right now, the [agencies’] lawyers draft the regulations, but they send to us to fine tune and fix up.
So when we were looking at [adopting a new XML structure], we considered perhaps integrating the process and having the [agency] lawyers work [directly] on the XML, [but] then we decided that it was much easier just to have our small group of people be familiar with XML, at least for the start.
So that’s what we decided to do. Our people were already very much familiar with SGML and HTML, so that the concepts of having the stylesheet and [underlying] code with the text in it were already quite familiar to us. It wasn’t that difficult for us to conceive of how XML would work, although I don’t think [even] I really want to work [directly] in straight XML code, thank you very much.
HH
Heavens, no.
RJ
I’ve worked with HTML and SGML, and that’s about as far as I want to go, thank you.
HH
I’ve got a question about terminology. With our newsletter, we use the term Data First to signify that when laws or regulations are first drafted, they exist as structured data to begin with, and then it’s easier to manipulate them or amend them over time.
We like Data First, but there are other ways to describe these concepts. What are some of the terms that you have used to describe what you’re doing, especially to audiences who might not be familiar?
RJ
Ah, that’s a good question. When we’re trying to [introduce people to] our most recent project, rather than [just] showing them a look under the hood to see the XML … [we] show them the benefits that they would see at the end of the day.
When we [introduce] our current project with Xcential and with LegisPro, we show the lawyers and our management: look at what this can do for you! Look at how much time this will save you look at how much time it will save everybody else. Look how much faster we can get things done.
[Amendments and modifications to regulations] will be correct the first time because you’re not depending on 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 people looking at it and having their fingers in it, and possibly there being errors introduced anywhere along the path of how we process this document and this data.
HH
Have you encountered enthusiasm for these advances? Or I guess, you know, the closest thing that there can be to enthusiasm for the structure of drafting, amending and maintaining?
RJ
Absolutely. We recently showed some of the people in our division the automated amendment feature that LegisPro has.
[This feature allows us to take] a track-changes document and then just press a button and have it spit out the amending document, which [otherwise] I’m sure lawyers pull their hair out trying to create, especially the way our system works here in Nova Scotia.
The lawyers that work on regulations are not legislative drafters. They’re actually solicitors within the department, so regulation is just one of the things that they do. They also are giving legal advice to all their client departments. [For these lawyers, amending regulations is a] specialized area that may not be one that they have spent a lot of time in.
So [the solicitors] kept having to draft a set of amending instructions, and that probably takes them way longer than it should.
[Now] we have this program in which we can just press a button and it’ll spit out [the completed amendment]. Not only spit it out, but then once the regulation is made law [it] will then integrate all of those changes automatically, consolidate your document within seconds. [This] usually takes us a two- to four-week publication turnaround time right now. This will get reduced to a day.
HH
I’m sure you’re excited about how the extra time could be used. But I’m equally certain that all of the different tasks of your office will amply occupy the suddenly available time.
RJ
Absolutely. Absolutely. There’s lots more to be done. There’s all sorts of things, all sorts of little projects. You’re always thinking: wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that later on?
You just don’t have time with the day-to-day grind in the day-to-day processes taking up your time. [This will] absolutely open up a lot of [time]. And as you said, [there’s] the data. Once you have an XML [structure], there’s so many more things you can do with it too.
HH
I would love to talk about a couple of those things.
Sometimes at Data First we talk about machine-readable regulation and machine-executable regulation. Machine-readable of course is what you’re doing now with your current project.
Machine-executable refers to the next step: the notion that there are some things in the regulations that can be electronically expressed, so that software can understand them. A due date, for instance, can be electronically expressed, and then compliance software can figure out what that means without somebody having to read the due dates.
And then more and more advanced as you get on, even the required regulatory reports. If they’re digitally expressed in the regs, then the systems can respond to whatever the regs say. What are some of your favorite ideas along the lines of machine executable regulation?
RJ
Ah, I think what excites me about the machine-executable idea is just that. So often you have a disconnect between what’s on paper and what the regulators and the departments are actually doing on the ground. The two tend to start kind of moving apart.
And what the departments need to do, obviously, is [interact electronically] with whoever it is that they’re regulating. It would be so fantastic to have that gap closed so that [regulated entities] are dealing with the regulations exactly as they have been written.
HH
Yes. And in the shorter term, maybe I’m modeling a machine-executable version of a section of reg. Even if it’s not the official version, or doesn’t have any legal weight, it can help aid in the drafting of the real one.
RJ
Absolutely, absolutely. The other thing we get excited about with XML is the ability to link, if you’re using it online, in any sort of publication online, by grabbing specific sections. So if a department wants to talk about their program and put a reference to Section 203 on their page, they can just grab Section 203 straight from the regulation, right? It’s automatically updated.
This way they don’t end up publishing an out-of-date Section 203. “Wait, that’s been amended three times since we posted this page!” This means you don’t have to go look, you don’t even have to check to see if [a given section of regulation is] up-to-date. It’s gonna go grab the latest version.
HH
Does your current project include the publication of a version of the of certain selected regs that is capable of such links?
RJ
That’s in the scope of what we’re trying to do. Yes.
And our province has a project underway to revamp our government website. They haven’t gotten around to us yet. They know how much data we have! At the end of the day, it would be really nice to have a website with a portal that links straight to that XML, and allow users to grab that XML. It’s open data, right? It’s just like many other governments have done: put that XML out there, and everybody can just use it.
HH
Just to close out our conversation, you and your team spend a lot of time in the nitty-gritty, you spend a lot of time on the specifics of regulations, and then the specifics of even figuring out style, which is necessary.
How do you connect that to the long-term ideas of maintaining a democracy? How do you see the adoption of better style and then later on better structure, and then better publication, maybe even machine-executable regulation, contributing to the maintenance of a parliamentary democracy?
RJ
Wow, that’s a big question. I think what our office is all about is access to the law. The main function of our office is to provide access to the law. The better we can do that, the faster we can do that, the easier we can give people access to the raw data, or [in the future] the machine-executable data, then the more people will use that and integrate that into what they’re doing as well.
If we can get a consolidated version [of a regulation] online a day after it’s passed, then people have access to that immediately. They don’t have to wait for 2, 3, or 4 weeks to see what the law says now. We could give them an amending instruction in the meantime, but who wants to read that? Nobody. Not even the lawyers want to read that.
Our contribution is making the law more accessible, making sure people have access directly to the law.
Part of our office also deals with plain-language standards. We’re very much into trying to make the law easier for people to read and easier to understand.
So here we have the LegisPro project, which will make law and regulation more accessible in terms of the speed [of publication] and the data. And [alongside that] we have our plain language function, where we’re trying to make it easier to read.
All of this means that people will have more real access to the law, instead of having to say: “I don’t know what this says, I’m gonna have to go get a lawyer. How do I read this amendment that just came out? I don’t know how to do this.”
That’s what we’re all about: making it easier for people to access. [It’s crucial] to democracy [to be] able to actually read and understand the law when you yourself have access to it.
HH
Yes, it’s certainly true that being able to understand the laws and regulations that one is subjected to, provides predictability.
RJ
And it gives you the opportunity to say hey, wait a minute, I want to change this! Whereas if you don’t even understand what [the law] is and you have to wait for a lawyer to tell you or wait until you’re on the wrong side of the law because you screwed up and you contravened something–that’s not the best way to go either.
We want to make sure people know in advance what it is that they are supposed to do and not do.
HH
On behalf of the Data First readership, and considering the benefits to democracy that you are pursuing in maintaining the regulations of Nova Scotia: Thank you. Thank you for the work that you’re doing.
RJ
You’re welcome.
