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 Thornhill
Yonge North Subway Extension
Station and tunnelling works take whole parcels at station sites and impose temporary working easements on neighbouring land. Businesses along the corridor may also have a claim for injurious affection where no land of theirs is taken at all.
Yonge Street corridor works
Road, streetscape and servicing reconstruction alongside the transit works takes frontage and disrupts access to commercial properties during construction.
Municipal servicing easements
Water and sewer works proceed by easement, permanently restricting what can be built across the burdened strip.
Worth knowing in Thornhill
The Yonge North Subway Extension is a priority transit project. On transit corridor land the Building Transit Faster Act, 2020 removes the right to request a hearing of necessity, so there is no 30-day window to challenge whether the taking should happen and no inquiry to wait for. Your compensation claim is untouched: market value, injurious affection, disturbance damages, business loss, interest and the section 32 costs rule all apply in full, and the section 10 election of your valuation date still runs 30 days from service of the Notice of Expropriation.
Who can expropriate in Thornhill
- •Metrolinx and the Province of Ontario
- •The Regional Municipality of York
- •The City of Vaughan and the City of Markham
- •Hydro One and local distribution utilities
What you are owed does not change by municipality
The Expropriations Act applies the same way in Thornhill 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.