A checklist for administrators, twelve months out

September 2026: check the policy, and prepare for vendor pitches

First, find out whether council has adopted a public-access policy since May 14th, 2026. Subsection (6) has required one since assent, so this can’t wait for 2027. The January section below covers what goes in it.

Vendors are already presenting on Bill 43. SUMA ran a webinar with Loop, Preparing for Bill 43: Building a Municipal Website Your Community Can Count On, on September 22nd, 2026. Bring a sheet of paper to each presentation with two columns, one for what the Act requires and one for what the vendor covered. Anything that’s only in the first column at the end is still yours to handle.

October: list your committees

Subsection (2) covers "the minutes of any committee or body established by council". That includes the recreation board, the fire committee, a utility board, a planning commission, a library board, or any other body council set up. The provincial directory doesn’t list committees, so your office is the only one that can make this list. Write down each committee, the year it started keeping minutes, and who has them now. If some are sitting in a volunteer’s house, that’s fine, as long as you know whose.

At the same time, note whether the municipality owns a corporation (usually a utility). Its financial statements and auditor’s report go online too, under subsection (1)(i).

November and December: gather the files

Pull the last five years of council and committee minutes, in whatever form they’re in. Anything you post has to stay up for at least five years after the end of the calendar year you posted it (subsection (4)(b)), so it’s worth starting with a tidy set. Typed minutes are already files. Paper minutes need scanning, and a scanned page is fine.

1. Council minutes, one file per meeting, named by date.
2. Committee minutes, one file per meeting, named by committee and date.
3. The audited financial statements and the auditor’s report, one file per year, as the accountant sent them.
4. The same for any controlled corporation.

When the amendments were announced on November 26th, 2025, the province said it "will begin posting municipal financial statements to saskatchewan.ca in January 2026", and since January 15th, 2026 the Publications Centre has carried three years of audited statements, 2022 to 2024, for every municipality. That helps residents find them, but it isn’t the municipality’s own website and doesn’t satisfy subsection (2) by itself. Check that your council’s statements are there, and post your own copy anyway.

January 2027 at the latest: adopt the policy

If council hasn’t adopted the policy yet, don’t let it go past January. Subsection (6) says the municipality "shall establish a policy respecting public access" to the subsection (1) documents. That covers all thirteen classes, including the nine that stay offline, and council adopts it. The policy has to cover three things:

1. the procedure for asking to inspect a document or get a copy, in physical and in electronic form,
2. the maximum time the office takes to respond, "not exceeding 30 days",
3. the fee for printed copies.

The fee "must not exceed the actual costs" (subsection (8)), and subsection (9) says what may count: wage costs, materials "including printer ink, paper and removable storage media", and other costs "directly and solely related" to producing the copy. If the office charges a flat rate per page today, check it against those three categories. If council’s already adopted this policy, tick it off and move on.

February: decide who posts, and how soon

Subsection (2) says the documents go up "in accordance with the prescribed deadlines". Those deadlines will be set by regulation, and as of September 24th, 2026 none had been made. Nobody knows yet how many days offices will get, or exactly when the count starts, though the approving meeting is the likely starting point. If you pick your own deadline now, you’ll be ready for whatever the province sets.

• Name the person who posts. It’s usually the administrator, plus one other person who knows the password.
• Set the interval. Posting within a few days of the meeting that approves the minutes is a safe default.
• Record both dates on every file: the date council approved it and the date it went up. Once the regulation is made, you’ll be able to show you met it.
• Redact before posting. Subsection (10) makes a posted document "published material" under The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. A name or civic address becomes public as soon as the file is up.

March and April: choose where to post

The Act says "a website available to the public" but doesn’t say whose. The province’s written reply to SUMA resolution 2026-03, Municipal Transparency Requirements, names four acceptable routes: a municipality’s own website, "a website jointly operated by multiple municipalities in a region", "an online portal hosted by SARM or SUMA", or "a service provider such as King’s Printer or OurSask". Any of the four meets the Act. The difference is whether residents can also find office hours, council members and the next meeting date in the same place, which is what most people expect from a community website.

Whichever you pick, test it as a resident would. Open the page in a browser where you’re not logged in and click on a set of minutes. The file should download with no login and no charge, since subsection (4)(a) forbids any fee "for accessing or downloading". A Facebook post doesn’t count, for the reasons in the section 117 guide.

May to August: upload the files and move notices online

With the files named, the policy adopted and a site chosen, what’s left is uploading. Start with the newest minutes and work backwards. Post each year’s statements when they arrive from the auditor. Have your backup person do at least one upload alone, so posting doesn’t depend on one person.

Bill 43 also changes where notices go. Section 3-25 of the Bill adds subsection 128(3.1) to the Act: "If notice is given online, it must be posted on at least 1 website available to the public." If the office gives notice online, the notice has to go on a public website, and a social media page alone won’t do. The simplest approach is to post notices on the same site as the minutes from the start.

After September 2027: bylaws, due in 2028

On September 1st, 2028, every bylaw currently in force has to be posted too (subsection (3)). For a rural municipality this is the bigger job, so work out its size before the end of 2027. Start by listing every bylaw in force. Then read subsection (5): where the municipality "maintains and publishes, in accordance with subsection (3), a consolidated copy of any bylaw that has been amended", the rule "does not apply to any bylaw whose sole purpose is to amend a bylaw already in force". If you consolidate the zoning bylaw and its amendments into one document, you only post one file. Our rough estimate is a one-time job of 50 to 300 files for a rural municipality, and how much you consolidate decides where in that range you land.