What section 117 actually requires, clause by clause

Which Act the rule is in

Bill 43 is The Municipalities Modernization and Red Tape Reduction Act. It passed the Legislative Assembly and received assent on May 14th, 2026, and it adds the same rule to three statutes: The Cities Act (section 91 there, one clause longer because cities already publish public accounts), The Municipalities Act (section 117) and The Northern Municipalities Act, 2010 (section 133). Towns, villages, resort villages and rural municipalities fall under The Municipalities Act, so section 117 is the one to cite.

Section 117 came into force on assent. The Saskatchewan Gazette of June 26th, 2026 lists section 3-23 of the Bill, which creates the new section 117, among the provisions in force from May 14th, 2026. The section is already law, even though its deadlines come later.

Subsection (1): what anyone may inspect at the office

Subsection (1) restates the existing right to walk in during business hours and look at the records, with a longer list than before. Anyone may inspect and copy:

1. any bylaw currently in force in the municipality,
2. any resolution,
3. any contract approved by council,
4. any account paid,
5. public disclosure statements,
6. the debentures register,
7. councillors’ oaths,
8. the financial statements and the auditor’s report,
9. the financial statements and auditor’s report of any controlled corporation,
10. any report of a consultant, an employee, or a committee or body council established, once it has been submitted to council (a lawyer’s opinion or report is excepted),
11. the minutes of any committee or body established by council, after council has approved them,
12. council minutes, after approval,
13. any other prescribed report or document.

Hang on to this list. The public-access policy in subsection (6) has to cover all thirteen, even though only four go online next year.

Subsection (2): four documents online from September 1st, 2027

From September 1st, 2027, four items from that list must be published "in a downloadable format on a website available to the public": (h) the financial statements and auditor’s report, (i) the same for any controlled corporation, (k) the approved minutes of council committees, and (l) the approved council minutes.

Nothing else on the list has to go online in 2027. Resolutions, contracts, accounts paid, the debentures register and consultants’ reports stay inspection-only. Some councils post more, and they’re free to, but the Act only requires the minutes and statements.

Offices tend to miss two of the four. Committee minutes covers every committee or board council established, including the recreation board, the fire committee, a utility board or a planning commission. The controlled-corporation line applies wherever the municipality owns a utility or a development corporation. The provincial directory doesn’t list either, so each council has to make its own list.

Subsection (3): every bylaw in force, from September 1st, 2028

A year later, item (a) is added: every bylaw currently in force, in the same downloadable form on the same public website. Only bylaws in force count. A repealed bylaw doesn’t have to be posted, and a bylaw repealed later can be taken down.

Subsection (5) reduces the work. Where a municipality "maintains and publishes, in accordance with subsection (3), a consolidated copy of any bylaw that has been amended", the requirement "does not apply to any bylaw whose sole purpose is to amend a bylaw already in force". If you consolidate a zoning bylaw and its eleven amendments into one document, you post one file instead of twelve. We’ll cover consolidation in a separate guide, since for a rural municipality it can mean posting a few dozen files instead of a few hundred.

Subsection (4): no fees, and kept for five years

Subsection (4) adds two rules. Nobody may be charged "for accessing or downloading" a posted document, which rules out a paywall and, in practice, a login. The subsection (2) documents (the minutes and statements) must stay "available on a website for at least 5 years after the end of the calendar year in which a document was posted". Minutes posted on September 1st, 2027 stay up until at least December 31st, 2032, and minutes posted in January 2028 until the end of 2033.

Bylaws don’t have a five-year clock. They stay up while they’re in force.

Subsections (6) to (9): the policy council has to adopt

This requirement is already in force. The municipality "shall establish a policy respecting public access" to the subsection (1) documents. In practice council adopts it, and the Act sets out what it has to include:

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

Subsection (7) says the office provides the copy inside the time the policy names. Subsection (8) says the fee "must not exceed the actual costs" of producing it, and subsection (9) lists what may count: wage costs, materials "including printer ink, paper and removable storage media", and other costs "directly and solely related" to providing the copy. If your office charges a flat rate per page, check that it doesn’t exceed those costs.

Subsection (10): posted documents count as published under FOIP

A document published under section 117 "is considered to be published material" within the meaning of clause 3(1)(a) of The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. In practice that means redacting personal information before the file goes up, because a name or civic address in a set of minutes becomes public as soon as it’s posted.

Subsection (11): what the regulations may add

The Lieutenant Governor in Council may prescribe other documents to be posted and may set "deadlines for a municipality to publish documents to a website". Both of the dates above are qualified with "in accordance with the prescribed deadlines", which means a regulation will eventually set how quickly a document has to go up. We expect the count to start at the meeting that approved it, but the Act doesn’t say. As of September 24th, 2026 no such regulation had been made. Until one is, post within a few days of the approving meeting and record both dates.

Public accounts, and a change to financial statements

Section 3-24 of the Bill, which isn’t in force yet, adds the municipality’s public accounts to the online list, and section 5-1 changes the public-accounts section so those too must be posted "in a downloadable format on a website available to the public". Public accounts will show the remuneration paid to each employee and member of council and the grants and contributions the municipality made. The section of the Act that creates them, section 185.1, was written in 2020 and isn’t in force either, so two orders in council are needed before any of this applies. Both will be published in the Gazette.

Section 3-27 is already in force. It deletes two phrases from the financial-statement section: "or a summary of them" and "in the manner the council considers appropriate". That means council has to publish the full statements in the form the Act now sets out.

What the section doesn’t say

It doesn’t say where the website has to be, who hosts it, or that it has to be the municipality’s own domain. The province’s written reply to SUMA resolution 2026-03, Municipal Transparency Requirements, names four acceptable routes: a municipality’s own website, a website shared by several municipalities in a region, a portal hosted by SARM or SUMA, or "a service provider such as King’s Printer or OurSask". It doesn’t set an accessibility standard, a file format beyond "downloadable", or a search requirement. Offices ask about Facebook a lot, and the Act doesn’t mention it. Our view is that it doesn’t qualify, because Facebook can remove a post at any time and files attached to posts are hard to download reliably. That’s difficult to square with "a website available to the public".

We did our own count on September 8th, 2026. We took every municipality in the provincial directory, visited every web address listed, and rechecked the doubtful ones on September 19th. Of 761 municipalities, 162 had no working site. Of those, 89 had only a Facebook page, 61 had nothing we could find, and 12 had a domain that was dead, unfinished or taken over.