The lot was salted last Tuesday. Not this Tuesday. You stepped out of the car, your foot slid out from under you, and you came down hard on your wrist. Someone helped you up. You drove yourself home and spent the next week telling everyone you were fine.
Three months on, the wrist still isn’t right, you’ve burned through your sick days, and the physio invoices are stacking up on the counter. That’s usually when people start wondering whether the property owner should be covering any of this. It’s also, for a lot of Ontarians, when they find out the window to protect that claim closed weeks ago.
The rule almost nobody knows about
Most people have absorbed the idea that you get two years to sue over an injury in Ontario. Broadly, that’s right. But for falls caused by snow or ice, the two-year limitation period isn’t the first deadline you have to worry about, and it isn’t the one that trips people up.
In late 2020, Ontario amended the Occupiers’ Liability Act. Bill 118 added a notice requirement: before you can bring an action for injury caused by snow or ice, written notice of the claim, including the date, time and location of the fall, has to be delivered within 60 days. It must be served personally or sent by registered mail to an occupier of the premises, or to the independent contractor hired to clear snow and ice there during the relevant period.
Sixty days. If it’s missed, you can be confident the other side will say so.
Why the rule exists, and why it still catches people out
The logic behind it isn’t unfair. Ice is evidence that melts. Salting records get archived, contractors lose accounts, staff move on, and nobody can reconstruct what a walkway looked like at 7:40 on a February morning two winters ago. Early notice gives an occupier a real chance to investigate while there’s something left to investigate.
The trouble is that the rule runs on a schedule injuries don’t keep. Soft tissue damage and concussions often feel survivable for the first few weeks. People wait to see whether it settles. They wait for imaging, for a specialist referral, for the moment they can no longer pretend they’re managing. By then two months have gone.
There are exceptions. The notice requirement doesn’t apply where the injured person dies of the injury, and a judge can excuse a late or inadequate notice where there’s a reasonable excuse and the defendant isn’t prejudiced in mounting a defence. Those are genuine safety valves. They’re also arguments you have to win on top of the case you already have.
Working out who to notify
Here’s where doing it yourself gets uncomfortable. One fall in a plaza parking lot can involve a landowner, a property manager, a commercial tenant and a snow clearing contractor who may or may not still hold the account. The statute asks for notice to at least one occupier or the contractor, but from the ground you don’t always know who those parties are.
Sending notice more widely than strictly necessary costs a stamp and some care. Sending it late costs considerably more. And if the fall happened on a municipal sidewalk or roadway rather than private property, different and shorter notice rules can apply, which is another reason not to work this out alone after the fact.
Evidence has a short shelf life too
Photographs taken the same day are worth more than any description you’ll give months later. A picture of the untreated surface, the drainage pattern, the tire tracks through unshovelled slush: that’s the case. Weather records from Environment and Climate Change Canada can establish what conditions were like that morning. An incident report filed with the store or building gives you a dated record. Surveillance footage is often overwritten within weeks unless someone asks for it to be preserved.
Keep the shoes you were wearing, too. Footwear becomes a live issue in nearly every ice case.
The people it hits hardest
Falls are not a minor category of injury in this country. The Public Health Agency of Canada reports that between 20% and 30% of seniors fall each year, and that fall-related hospitalizations account for roughly 85% of injury hospitalizations in that age group. A winter fall a younger person walks off can mean a fractured hip and three weeks in hospital for someone in their seventies.
Those are precisely the claimants least likely to have heard of a 60-day notice rule, and most likely to spend the first two months focused on recovery rather than paperwork.
What notice does and doesn’t do
Serving notice isn’t suing anyone. It doesn’t lock you into litigation, doesn’t require a diagnosis or a dollar figure, and doesn’t commit you to anything. It preserves an option.
It also doesn’t replace the limitation period. Notice within 60 days and a claim started within the limitation period are two separate requirements, and satisfying one does nothing for the other. The notice rule is specific to snow and ice, as well. A fall caused by a wet floor, a broken step or poor lighting is governed by the ordinary occupiers’ liability rules, with no 60-day clock attached.
If you’re reading this in the first weeks after a fall and you’re unsure whether the injury is serious enough to bother with, that uncertainty is the argument for asking now rather than in the spring. Lang Lawyers, a North York firm that handles slip and fall and other injury claims across Ontario on a contingency basis, is one place to put the question, and most practices doing this work will say the same about timing. What the injury is worth is something you can sort out later. Whether you still have a claim is a question that answers itself in 60 days.
