2026-10-11News
Thirty-five states, and the Americas close
Canada is published, and with it every sovereign state in the Americas. Five records in the hemisphere are still unwritten, and each one is unwritten because a publisher would not hand its law over.
The site now covers thirty-nine countries. Thirty-five of them are the sovereign states of the Americas, which is all of them: ten in North and Central America, thirteen in the Caribbean, twelve in South America. The other four are Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain, added because this corpus kept quoting them. Canada was the last of the thirty-five and went up today.
What a closed hemisphere buys is not a bigger number. It is that a question can finally be asked of everybody at once without the answer being shaped by which statute books happened to be convenient. When thirty-three of thirty-five countries are covered, 'no country here does X' is a sentence about our reading list. At thirty-five it is a sentence about the Americas.
It also means the gaps are visible for what they are. Five topic records in the hemisphere have no page, and none of them is missing because nobody got round to it.
What Canada brought that nothing else here had
Four things, and three of them are shapes rather than rules.
**A middle class of traveller.** Canada sorts visitors into three classes rather than two, and the middle one is a shape no record here had needed before. Citizens of the states in Schedule 1.1 need no visa. Citizens of the seventeen countries in the table to section 7.01 of the Regulations need a visa or an electronic travel authorization, and may have the authorization only if they already hold a Canadian visa issued in the last ten years or a valid United States one. Eleven of those seventeen are countries covered here, and the condition is written so that a first-time traveller satisfies neither limb.
**An exemption that is not a citizenship.** Paragraph 190(1)(c) of the same Regulations exempts a national of the United States from the visitor visa, and in the same sentence exempts a person lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence. Every other exemption in that section turns on a citizenship or a travel document. This one turns on an immigration status granted by a third country, which means a Brazilian or a Colombian holding a green card is exempt from a visa their own passport would require.
**A selection power split with a province, and a statute that says so.** Section 8 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act makes selection, sponsorship and the acquisition of status consistent with federal-provincial agreements despite the other provisions of the Act. The Regulations then carry it four times over: Quebec's criteria replace Canada's for everyone intending to settle there except the family class, a labour market assessment for a Quebec job is made in concert with the province, a study permit for Quebec needs the province's certificate, and the start-up business class is prescribed only for people who intend to live somewhere else.
**An answer that is not national at all.** Canada issues no driving licence. The record here is Ontario's, and it says so: Ontario names the United States and Japan in its own regulation and leaves every other country to a reciprocal exchange agreement the regulation does not reproduce. No state of Latin America or the Caribbean is named in either Ontario regulation we read.
The five that are not written, and why
Haiti is at twelve topics of fifteen. Banking, driving and customs are unwritten because no reachable Haitian publisher serves the instruments they would rest on. What is written for Haiti rests in part on a 1987 gazette whose scan prints 'candi tians' for conditions and 'hai t.fenne' for haitienne, and those quotations are left exactly as the gazette's own layer has them.
Venezuela is at thirteen of fifteen. Customs is unwritten because the Ley Organica de Aduanas came back from its publisher with Chinese spliced into Spanish clauses, and nothing can be quoted from a document in that condition. Banking is unwritten for a plainer reason: the National Assembly answers an Apache forbidden page for statute after statute, and thirty-nine of those pages sat in our store as readings until the detector was taught what a forbidden page actually says.
The distinction those five carry is the one worth keeping. A topic with no record here means we could not read the law. It never means the law does not exist, and no absence on this site is ever recorded from a request that did not come back.
Where the corpus stands
Thirty-nine countries, thirty-seven of them complete on every topic that can carry a citation. Nine hundred and fifty-nine records in force. Nine thousand three hundred and ninety-one quotations, every one of them checked against a stored reading of the document it is attributed to before this was published. Two hundred and twenty-four publishers, each carrying what it cannot be cited for. Fifteen nationality groups and three blocs.
Two topics are closed permanently and are counted against nobody: nothing in culture and etiquette could carry a citation, and a safety ranking across these countries would be a comparison of incomparable statistics.
What this rests on
Puerto Rico and French Guiana are not among the thirty-five and are not oversights. United States immigration law applies in one and French and Schengen law in the other, so a page about either would be a page about another country's visas wearing a local name.
Completing the Americas is a statement about coverage, not about depth. Every country here answers the same fifteen questions, and several of those answers rest on a single instrument that has not been re-read since it was first stored.