Canlii MCP

What Vaquill-AI/canlii-mcp MCP server does

Vaquill-AI/canlii-mcp MCP server connects MCP-compatible clients to the CanLII Canadian legal information API. It covers federal, provincial, and territorial collections, including courts, tribunals, statutes, and regulations. The server returns metadata rather than the contents of legal documents: titles, citations, dates, keywords, and citation relationships.

Its tools let an agent first discover available databases, then browse records within a selected court, tribunal, statute, or regulation collection. Case metadata can be retrieved for a specific result, and citation queries can identify authorities cited by a case, cases that cite it, or legislation referenced by it.

How it works

The hosted MCP endpoint is available at https://canlii-mcp.vaquill.ai/mcp. Clients that support MCP streamable HTTP can send the CanLII credential in the X-CanLII-Token header. Header-less clients can pass the credential as the token or canlii_token URL parameter. The hosted endpoint does not require a Vaquill bearer token.

Local deployments can run over stdio, HTTP, Docker, or a Cloudflare Worker. In stdio mode, the server reads the CanLII key from CANLII_API. HTTP deployments can also use MCP_AUTH_TOKEN to require a bearer token for incoming requests. HTTP mode is stateless: each MCP request is self-contained and does not require a session initialization handshake.

Setup and configuration

The documented quick-start command uses Node.js 22 or newer and the npm package @tomilashy/canlii-mcp:

{
  "command": "npx",
  "args": ["-y", "@tomilashy/canlii-mcp"],
  "env": { "CANLII_API": "your_api_key" }
}

The CanLII key is obtained through CanLII’s API application process. The server does not provide a fallback key and does not store keys supplied with requests. A self-hosted HTTP instance can set PORT, which defaults to 3000; MCP_AUTH_TOKEN is optional and adds bearer-token protection.

The hosted configuration examples cover Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, and Windsurf. The hosted URL can be used directly by clients that support custom HTTP headers. Stdio-only clients require a separate proxy according to the README.

Tools and capabilities

• list_case_databases: discover CanLII court and tribunal databases.
• list_cases: browse decisions from a selected case database.
• get_case: retrieve a case’s title, citation, date, and keywords.
• get_case_citations: inspect cited cases, citing cases, or referenced legislation.
• list_legislation_databases: discover statute and regulation databases.
• list_legislation: browse entries in a selected legislation database.
• get_legislation: retrieve metadata for a specific legislative item.

Limitations and notes

The Vaquill-AI/canlii-mcp MCP server is limited by the CanLII API’s metadata-only coverage. It cannot provide full case opinions, statute text, or regulation text through these tools. API usage is subject to per-key limits enforced by the server: one request at a time, two requests per second, and 5,000 requests per day. Usage is tracked independently for each CanLII key, and requests beyond the daily allowance return an error instead of being sent to CanLII.

Because every hosted request uses the caller’s own CanLII key, the available quota depends on that key. The project is released under the MIT license.