Metrolinx has identified roughly 906 properties it needs for the Ontario Line. If yours is one of them, the most valuable thing you can know is that the owner is not always the only claimant.
The Ontario Line runs 15.6 kilometres from downtown Toronto to the northeast, and the property requirements are the largest concentration of transit land assembly the city has seen in a generation. The heaviest residential impact falls through the east end, in and around Riverdale and Leslieville. Metrolinx has been contacting owners of every property it proposes to acquire, and tenants where it can identify them.
How the formal process starts
Early contact from Metrolinx or its agents is not the expropriation. It is an attempt to negotiate a purchase before the statutory process begins, and that distinction is worth money. An agreement reached at that stage is a voluntary sale. It can forgo protections that attach only once the Expropriations Act process is running, including the section 32 costs rule, which can shift your appraisal and legal costs onto the authority once compensation is determined.
The formal process begins when a Notice of Application for Approval to Expropriate is served on every registered owner and published in a local newspaper for three consecutive weeks.
There is no hearing of necessity for the Ontario Line. The Building Transit Faster Act, 2020 disapplies the relevant provisions of the Expropriations Act to expropriations of land at least partly on transit corridor land for a priority transit project, and the Ontario Line is one of the four named projects, along with the Scarborough Subway Extension, the Yonge North Subway Extension and the Eglinton Crosstown West Extension. There is no mechanism to contest whether the taking should happen. The deadline that does apply is the section 10 election: 30 days from service of the Notice of Expropriation to choose your valuation date, failing which the plan registration date is deemed.
Tenants have their own claim
This is the part that gets missed, and on a line running through the east end it will be missed a great many times.
A lease is an interest in land. When the property is taken, the tenant's interest is taken along with the owner's. A tenant can have a compensable claim in their own right for disturbance costs and, if they run a business on the premises, for business loss, entirely separate from whatever the landlord recovers for the freehold.
The assumption that the claim belongs wholly to the owner costs commercial tenants real money. A restaurant, a shop, or a small manufacturer on a leased site that has to relocate incurs moving costs, fit-out costs at the new location, and lost profits through the transition. None of that is the landlord's loss and none of it is compensated by the landlord's settlement. If you lease space on a property Metrolinx is acquiring, get your own advice rather than waiting to hear what your landlord agreed to.
What owners can claim
- Market value of the land taken, assessed without regard to any change in value caused by the transit project itself. That principle cuts both ways: Metrolinx cannot pay you less because its own announcement softened the local market, and cannot be asked to pay more because the announcement lifted it.
- Injurious affection, where only part of your property is taken, for the reduction in value of what you keep. On the Ontario Line this matters most for properties left adjacent to permanent structures such as emergency exit buildings, vent shafts, and portals.
- Disturbance damages: moving, storage, mortgage prepayment penalties on a forced discharge, professional fees, and the reasonable cost of re-establishing in a comparable location.
- Business loss, if you operate on the property, for lost profits and goodwill attributable to the move.
- Interest at 6% per year under section 33, and, where the property taken was your home, a 5% residential allowance under section 18 for the inconvenience and cost of finding another residence.
The money you should take right away
Within three months of registering the expropriation plan, and before taking possession, the authority must serve a written offer with an appraisal report. Section 25 requires that offer to include immediate payment of 100% of the market value the authority itself estimates for your land.
Take it. The Act provides that payment and receipt of that sum is without prejudice to your rights. It does not settle your claim, waive any argument, or stop you negotiating or going to the Ontario Land Tribunal for the balance. Owners routinely leave that money with Metrolinx for a year because they assume accepting it would count as agreement. It does not. The document to be careful about is a full and final release, which is a different thing entirely.
Practical steps
- Record the date of service. The 30-day section 10 election of your valuation date runs from it.
- If you are a tenant, do not assume you have no claim. Find out.
- Keep every document and every receipt connected to the property and to any anticipated move, starting now.
- Get your own appraisal. The authority's appraiser works for the authority, and on partial takings the difference is concentrated in injurious affection.
- Have any pre-notice purchase offer reviewed before signing, not after.
More on the process in what to do after an expropriation notice and on the Toronto expropriation page.
