I noticed this a few years ago, e.g. City of Toronto seems to pay more than even MAG (which itself seems high for government, comparatively speaking.) To what extent do municipalities tend to have the sort of pension Ontario MAG lawyers have?
Caveat that this advice is from the mid 2010's:
I honestly do not remember how I bound mine.
I did not skip anything except for a handful of paragraphs about some arcane securities/commercial topic. I have never heard of this skipping all of tax thing you mention.
I made mine in a group, traded with another group or maybe two, but ultimately what I used most was either just what I knew or the detailed ToC. If I had to honestly estimate I used an index for max 10% of the questions.
I think I did the former, but I sort of focused on understanding in a broad sense what I was reading and then updating.
I think treating it like a regular full time job is sufficient.
I did some free practice exam questions. I don't think it is actually that necessary, I would probably just do free ones.