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 Windsor
Highway 401 widening toward London
The Ministry is widening the remaining four-lane sections between Windsor and London to six. Acquisition along an existing right of way is mostly partial, taking frontage and registering construction easements rather than whole parcels.
Border and customs infrastructure
Crossing and inspection plaza works take land under federal authority, which follows the federal Expropriation Act rather than Ontario's. The procedure, the deadlines and the compensation heads all differ from a provincial taking.
Transmission corridors across southwestern Ontario
Hydro One transmission projects in the southwest proceed largely by easement. You keep title while losing the ability to build, plant or drain across the burdened strip, and compensation should price that permanent restriction rather than one season's disruption.
Worth knowing in Windsor
Windsor is one of the few places in Ontario where an owner genuinely needs to establish which government is taking the land before doing anything else. A provincial highway taking runs under Ontario's Expropriations Act and the PTHIA, with the section 10 valuation-date election running 30 days from the Notice of Expropriation and section 32 costs available at the end. A taking for border infrastructure runs under the federal Expropriation Act, which has its own notice periods, its own hearing process and its own costs regime. Work out which one you are in before responding to anything, because the deadlines are not the same and the wrong assumption forfeits rights that cannot be recovered.
Who can expropriate in Windsor
- •The Province of Ontario and the Ministry of Transportation
- •The Government of Canada and its agencies, under the federal Expropriation Act
- •The City of Windsor and the County of Essex
- •Hydro One
- •Essex Region Conservation Authority
What you are owed does not change by municipality
The Expropriations Act applies the same way in Windsor 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.