Yes.
Mr. Chair, it's true that the vast majority of federal legislation that enables the making of regulations does not contain a mandatory prepublication requirement. The practice existed to a greater extent before the first federal regulatory policy enacted in 1986 by the Mulroney government. At that point, the government decided to create a mandatory prepublication requirement for the federal regulatory process, in addition to increasing the amount of analysis required before any regulatory action was created.
The tendency has been in more recent years to rely on the cabinet directive in order to determine when it's most appropriate to prepublish proposed regulatory projects.