An expropriating authority has sent you an offer and a cheque. The most common mistake owners make at this moment is thinking those two things are the same decision. They are not.
When a government body, a municipality, a utility, or an agency like Metrolinx expropriates land in Ontario, the process is governed by the Expropriations Act. Within three months of registering the expropriation plan on title, the authority must serve you with a written offer of compensation. Alongside that offer comes money. Understanding what the money is, and what it is not, is the single most valuable thing an owner can learn early.
The Section 25 Payment Is Not a Settlement
Section 25 of the Act requires the authority to pay you the full amount it has offered for the market value of the land, immediately, and expressly without prejudice to your right to claim more. This is not a partial advance and it is not a deposit. It is the authority's own valuation, paid over in full, while the question of whether that valuation is correct remains completely open.
Owners routinely leave this money uncashed for months because they believe accepting it will be treated as agreement. It will not. The statute is deliberately built the other way around: the legislature wanted owners to have funds in hand so that financial pressure could not be used to force a cheap settlement. Refusing the payment does not strengthen your position. It only means you are financing the dispute yourself.
"Take the section 25 money. It is yours either way. The only thing you should be slow about is signing anything that describes itself as full and final."
What the Offer Usually Leaves Out
The authority's offer is prepared by the authority's appraiser. That is not an accusation of bad faith, it is simply whose instructions the appraiser is working under. In practice, a first offer tends to be built around the market value of the land taken and very little else. The Act allows considerably more:
Injurious affection to the land you are keeping, where a partial taking has reduced what remains. Disturbance damages, meaning the real and documented costs of being moved. Business loss, where the taking interferes with a business operating on the land. The section 18 allowance for a residential owner, which recognises the cost and inconvenience of finding another home. We deal with these heads in detail in our articles on injurious affection and business losses and on disturbance damages and partial takings.
None of those heads appear on their own. They are claimed, evidenced, and argued. An offer that is silent on all of them is not a wrong offer so much as an incomplete one.
The Question to Ask Before You Sign
The useful question is not whether the offer sounds like a lot of money. Land values are unfamiliar territory for most people and a six figure number can feel generous when you have no comparison. The useful question is narrower: what did the appraiser assume about the highest and best use of this land, and is that assumption right?
A property valued as it is currently used, when it could reasonably have been developed or rezoned, produces a very different number from one valued on its actual potential. That single assumption moves offers by more than every other line item combined.
The Cost of Getting a Second Opinion
This is where owners hesitate, and where the Act does something unusual. Section 32 provides that where the compensation ultimately determined is at least 85 percent of what the authority offered, the authority is generally required to pay the owner's reasonable legal, appraisal, and other costs. The structure exists precisely so that an owner with a genuine claim is not priced out of testing the offer. We explain how that works in who pays your expropriation lawyer.
Deadlines Are Running
Separate from compensation, you have 30 days from service of the Notice of Application to request a Hearing of Necessity, which challenges whether the taking should occur at all. That window closes quickly and does not reopen. If you have received any document from an expropriating authority, our expropriation practice page sets out your rights, and the first evaluation is free and confidential.
