The workbench for Canadian
federal compliance work.
Read any federal Act or regulation in force today, mark the provisions you're testing, document your methodology and findings, and export a finished workbook, all without copying citations by hand into a spreadsheet.
Every federal Act and regulation, in force today.
The Department of Justice publishes nearly 6,000 Acts and regulations in English and French. Marginalia ingests the full corpus and keeps it current, so you're reading the consolidation that was actually in force on the date you're testing, not last year's PDF you downloaded in a hurry.
Proper typesetting
Parts, divisions, subdivisions, sections, subsections, paragraphs, subparagraphs, clauses, all rendered with the indentation, citation chips, and marginal notes you'd expect from a properly typeset statute. Click any citation to copy a direct link to that provision.
Full-text search
Search inside one regulation or across the whole corpus. Results show the matching provision with enough surrounding context that you can narrow down your hits without opening every one.
Version history
Step through every consolidation by amendment date. Essential when your testing period spans an amendment and you need to know exactly which version was in force at the relevant time.
Compare versions
Pick any two dates and see exactly what changed between them: additions, deletions, and re-numbered provisions, rendered in a familiar track-changes style with side-by-side context.
Table of contents sidebar
A sticky left-panel lists every Part and top-level section. The current section highlights as you scroll. Jump anywhere in a long regulation without losing your place.
Definitions, schedules, history
Defined terms link back to their definition. Schedules, including CALS-format tables, render natively. The full enactment and amendment history is one click away from any regulation.
Build the workbook while you read the law.
Most auditors test federal requirements against a spreadsheet they assembled by hand. Marginalia replaces that with a structured editor that lives alongside the reader, so marking a requirement, adding a testing step, and recording your result is one workflow, not three separate tools.
Single and control plans
A single plan is scoped to one regulation. A control plan can span any number of regulations, which is useful when a firm-level control needs to cover requirements that show up across the federal stack.
Mark testable, work the list
Walk through the regulation in the reader and mark the provisions you're testing. They land in the editor in document order, one row per citation, ready for testing steps and a result.
Steps and substeps
Document every step you'll take to test each requirement. Add substeps for sample-selection details. Steps can apply to a single requirement, to a group, or to the whole plan.
Methodology
Capture testing-period scope, sample sizes, sampling approach, risk tolerance, testing frequency by control type, and rating definitions. The Excel export carries it to a dedicated methodology tab.
Results and findings
A structured note editor on every requirement: points, sub-points, per-step status. Observations and findings at plan level too. Everything your reviewer needs in one place.
Export to Excel or JSON
One click produces a curated workbook with your methodology, requirements, testing steps, results, and observations, formatted and ready to drop into a client file. JSON export is available for sharing plans between deployments.
Built for the work auditors actually do: tracing a control to its statutory requirement, documenting the test, and producing a deliverable a senior reviewer can follow and sign off on.
Your notes stay with the citation.
Annotate provisions directly in the reader. Favourites, tags, and notes follow citations across consolidations, so your work survives a new amendment without cleanup.
Favourites and tags
Mark any provision a favourite. Create tags for the categories that matter to your practice and apply them to individual sections. The library view collects everything in one filterable list.
Rich notes
Attach a formatted note to any provision: headings, bold, bullets, links. Notes are private to your account, and they follow the citation even when a new consolidation is published.
Threaded comments
For collaborative reviews, leave threaded comments on a specific section. Mark threads resolved as you work through them and keep the conversation in context.
Encrypted before it leaves your browser.
Your testing notes, methodology, and findings are encrypted in your browser before they reach the server. The server stores ciphertext only. An administrator with full database access still can't read your work.
Your password is your key
Your password derives the encryption key locally; the server never sees it in a form that could unlock your data. Even under a court order for server contents, your prose notes remain unreadable without your credentials.
24-word recovery phrase
At signup you receive a one-time 24-word recovery phrase: the only way back into your data if you ever forget your password. Write it on paper. Keep it somewhere safe. It is not recoverable.
Structural metadata stays readable
The provisions you mark testable, the section citations, and structural metadata remain readable to the server so it can render your plan and count progress correctly. Only your prose content is encrypted.
Full details in the privacy policy.
Details that matter in practice.
Light and dark themes
Defaults to your system setting. A toggle in the header lets you switch explicitly, and the choice sticks to your account across sessions and devices.
Print and save as PDF
Clean print styles on most pages. The testing workbook export and the legal pages both print cleanly for dropping into a compliance file or binder.
In-app tutorials
An interactive walkthrough covers the reader, annotations, testing plans, and exports, overlaid on the real application so you're learning the actual UI, not a demo environment.
Admin-gated access
New accounts are request-then-approve. Administrators work a queue of pending requests and decide who joins. Credentials can be force-reset when needed.
Bilingual corpus
Every federal Act and regulation is published by the Department of Justice in English and French. Marginalia ingests both, so you can read and test in either official language.
Self-hosted
Runs on infrastructure your firm controls, on-premises or a cloud account you manage. Your data, encrypted work product and structural metadata both, stays within your perimeter.