This page is legal information, not legal advice. It describes the law in general terms and cannot account for the facts of your situation. Reading it does not create a lawyer and client relationship. For advice you can act on, speak with a lawyer about your own matter.
What is taking land in Sudbury
Highway 69 four-laning
Roughly 68 kilometres between Sudbury and the Parry Sound area remain two lanes, with sections expected to be under heavy construction. Acquisition along the corridor takes frontage from properties backing onto the existing highway and whole parcels where the alignment shifts.
Highway 17 and district corridor works
Ministry widening and structure work along Highway 17 takes frontage and registers staging easements around each structure.
Transmission, resource and access corridors
Utility corridors and the access roads serving resource development proceed largely by easement across rural and forested land, where the loss is the permanent restriction on use rather than the acreage itself.
Worth knowing in Sudbury
Two things are specific to this corridor. First, the remaining stretch of Highway 69 runs through reserve land belonging to Magnetawan, Henvey Inlet and Shawanaga First Nations, and land on reserve is not acquired under Ontario's Expropriations Act at all. That process is federal and separate, which is part of why the corridor has no firm completion date. For a private owner off reserve, the ordinary Ontario rules apply unchanged. Second, on rural and forested land the valuation argument is rarely about the acreage. It is about what the parcel's highest and best use was, whether that is resource, recreational, or development potential, and about injurious affection to the land you keep once a four-lane highway runs past it.
Who can expropriate in Sudbury
- •The Province of Ontario and the Ministry of Transportation
- •The City of Greater Sudbury and surrounding municipalities
- •Hydro One
- •Conservation Sudbury
What you are owed does not change by municipality
The Expropriations Act applies the same way in Sudbury as anywhere else in Ontario. What differs is which authority is taking the land and what the works do to what you keep.
- •Market value of the land taken, assessed without regard to any change in value caused by the scheme of the expropriation itself.
- •Injurious affection, the drop in value of the land you keep. On partial takings this is frequently worth more than the strip taken.
- •Injurious affection where no land is taken, under section 1(1)(b), for owners damaged by the construction of the works, and not their use, even though nothing of theirs is expropriated. Section 22 bars this claim absolutely unless it is made in writing with particulars within one year of the damage being sustained or becoming known, and nothing is served on you to warn you the clock is running.
- •Disturbance damages, the real costs you incur: moving, storage, mortgage prepayment penalties, professional fees, re-establishment.
- •Business loss, if you operate on the property, including lost profits and goodwill attributable to the works.
- •Interest at 6% per year under section 33 on the market value and injurious affection portions, running from when you cease to reside on or make productive use of the land, and where the land taken was your home, a 5% allowance on the market value of the residential part under section 18(1)(a)(i), provided the land was not being offered for sale on the date of expropriation. That allowance is payable to an owner other than a tenant; a tenant is compensated for disturbance under section 18(2) instead, apportioned by the length of the term and the tenant's investment.
Under section 32, if the Ontario Land Tribunal awards you 85% or more of the amount the authority offered, the authority pays your reasonable legal and appraisal costs, and you do not have to beat the offer outright to get there. The qualification worth knowing is that the Court of Appeal held in Shergar that "the amount offered" includes later settlement offers, not just the section 25 offer, so an improved offer raises the bar and falling below it puts costs in the Tribunal's discretion. Favourable, but conditional.
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General legal information about Ontario expropriation law, not legal advice. Reading this page does not create a solicitor and client relationship.