In 1997, following a proposal
from the Minister of Justice, the gouvernement du Québec decided
to modernize the publication of rights system in order to adapt
it to the needs of contemporary society. In fact, all the information
related to real property rights was recorded in the hundreds of
millions of pages included in the Land registers and documents kept
in each registration division. Since a large part of this
documentation is on paper, updating the Land registers was done
by hand in a few registry offices.
Keeping such a significant amount of active documentation on paper,
including certain elements from over 170 years ago, posed various
problems:
The fragile nature and deterioration of numerous unique documents
made manipulating them delicate.
The accumulation of documents on paper leaded to a constant
increase in operating costs related to the space required to keep
them.
Paper support was an obstacle to any improvements in service,
such as the possibility of accessing information in the documents
remotely, and the use and creation of links between several files.
Modernizing the publication of rights system presented
numerous challenges, including the implementation of a new computer
system and the digitalization of the documents. Moreover, the government
has entered into a partnership agreement with private enterprise
in this regard.
