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We have free access to law with canlii.org in Canada.

I'm not familiar at all with Canadian law. Does canlii.org provide statutes, regs, case law from every jurisdiction from the local level (cities/towns) up through the federal level? Is this a distinction that matters?

You can see CanLII's coverage here: https://www.canlii.org/en/databases.html.

That is magnificent. It seems to "end" at the province/territory level (*this is not a critique at all). How does lawmaking work at the city level?

Cities pass "bylaws" that affect their municipality. In Canada municipalities are more limited in their lawmaking powers than cities in some other countries.

Bylaws are hard to lookup and are city-specific.

It is free-ish. It's free to use but there are restrictive licensing terms that prevent anyone from building anything with it: http://www.canlii.org/en/info/terms.html.

My blog post on this topic: https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-case-law-private/ and https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/canlii-licensing-terms/.

My previous comment was a bit harsh on CanLII. They actually do have an API for building some limited types of applications: http://developer.canlii.org/docs. But certainly not the sort of free and open access that a developer would want for building something like a search engine.

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