Clear to Enter

Immigration rules are public, and almost nobody can read them. The Act and its Regulations run to hundreds of sections, and the figures people need most keep changing: the fees, the draw cutoffs, the processing times. The people looking them up are often anxious, sometimes about a criminal record at a border. They need a clear reading and a reason to believe it. On a topic like this, sounding sure of itself is the one thing a site cannot get away with.

The idea is to show the source every time. The homepage opens a real section of the law, such as the criminality rule at section 36, and puts an everyday reading under each phrase. A reader picks a situation, sees the section that covers it, reads what it means, and moves on to the free tool that goes further or to the official text on the Justice Laws Website.

The numbers run on one system. Fees, thresholds, processing times and program status live in central datasets. The 197 guides and the calculators read from them, so a fee change is made once and every page that quotes it updates. Every tool shows the date its data was last checked, and a public ledger lists each dataset with its official source. A watchdog script re-reads the government pages and reports anything that has moved.

A visitor never has to sign up. The tools answer in the browser, and what someone types into them is never sent to the site or to analytics. Google Analytics waits until the visitor scrolls, taps or types, or until eight seconds pass, so it stays out of the way of the first view. The whole site runs in English and French, 3,457 pages in all.

The September 2026 release went through my formal jury review before it shipped. The phone menu was rebuilt to work from the keyboard, every page was made to reflow at 320 pixels wide, and a citation check fails on any statute reference that does not resolve. All 871 English law summaries were rewritten to a grade 8 reading level, and the rewrite found and corrected about 180 places where the old summaries misstated the law. The site is built toward WCAG 2.2 AA, and each free tool states the rule and the numbers while leaving the decision to officers and licensed advisers.

The free site also leads somewhere. Two textbooks, marked coming soon, go deeper than the guides, and 178 guides end with the volume that covers their subject. The pricing page shows the real tables of contents with honest reading times and a free first chapter before anyone pays.

The pattern transfers to any business that explains something complicated: a clinic's intake rules, a municipality's bylaws, a contractor's permit steps. Put the source beside an everyday reading, keep every figure in one place with its date, and let the visitor check the work for themselves. I can build the same structure around a price list, a policy manual or a set of regulations.