Home / Case types / Slips, trips and falls / Ontario
Occupiers’ liability — ice, floors, stairs, parking lots, property maintenance · ON
Slips, trips and falls in Ontario
Two claims run in parallel — benefits from your own insurer, and a lawsuit that has to clear a legal threshold.
These claims are won or lost on evidence that stops existing within about seventy-two hours.
Provincial detail verified 2026-05-01
Two years from discovery
The Limitations Act, 2002 sets a basic two-year period running from the day the claim was discovered — which is not always the day of the accident — with a fifteen-year ultimate bar. Minors and persons under disability are treated differently.
Not the same case twice
Occupiers’ liability is not about whether you fell. It is about whether the person responsible for that property had a reasonable system of inspection and maintenance, and whether they followed it that day. That means maintenance logs, contractor records, weather data and surveillance footage that overwrites itself on a loop. The claim is effectively built or lost before most people have finished being sore.
Short fuses in Ontario
The deadlines that end claims long before the limitation period does
These are provincial and they are short. Whether any of them apply to your facts is a legal question — which is the reason we ask about them in the first ten minutes.
- Auto insurer: notify within days of the accident and return the completed benefits application within a short fixed window, or benefits can be delayed or denied.
- Municipal road or sidewalk disrepair: written notice measured in days, not months, under the Municipal Act, 2001.
- Snow and ice on private premises: a written notice requirement under the Occupiers’ Liability Act that catches a large share of winter falls.
- Claims against the Crown, transit authorities and school boards carry their own notice regimes.
What changes the match
Facts that move a slips, trips and falls file to a different practitioner
Who controlled the property
Owner, tenant, property manager and snow-removal contractor may all be liable, or none of them. Naming the wrong defendant and discovering it after a limitation period expires is a known, preventable disaster.
Snow and ice specifically
Several provinces impose a short written-notice requirement for winter falls that is far shorter than the limitation period. Missing it can end the claim outright.
Whether it happened on public property
Municipal claims carry their own short notice periods and, in some provinces, a higher standard of proof against the municipality.
Footwear, lighting and what you were carrying
Contributory negligence is the defence’s main lever here. A firm that gathers these facts honestly early builds a stronger case than one that avoids them.
Whether an incident report was filed
A report filed at the time is powerful. No report is not fatal, but it changes how quickly counsel must move to secure independent evidence.
- Accident-benefits denials and tort claims are genuinely different practices. Some firms are formidable at one and thin at the other; a serious file usually needs both handled well.
- The Licence Appeal Tribunal is where denied benefits are fought. Tribunal volume is a measurable proxy we look at.
- Ontario is the most heavily advertised legal market in Canada. Marketing spend and case results are close to uncorrelated here.
Worth doing now
Early moves that decide how this file ends
- A preservation letter for video surveillance within days — most systems overwrite in one to four weeks.
- Formal requests for maintenance and inspection logs and any snow-clearing contract.
- Securing archived weather station data for the relevant hours.
Property owners are not automatically responsible for every fall on their land. The legal standard is reasonableness, not perfection. A firm that promises you a result before seeing the maintenance records is selling something.
Ten minutes gets you one name for a Ontario slips, trips and falls file
The intake asks the Ontario-specific questions above, reads back what it sees, and nothing reaches any firm until you say go.
Same claim, other provinces
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