In Ontario, the maintenance record is the defence
· 3 min read
Ask a property manager whether the salt went down before the morning rush and you will almost always get a confident yes. Ask them to prove it eighteen months later, in front of a lawyer, and the confidence tends to drain out of the room.
In premises liability, the fight is almost always about evidence rather than effort. The work happened. Producing something that shows it happened is the hard part.
Courts look for a scheme, not a memory
Under Ontario’s occupiers’ liability framework, a corporation is expected to take reasonable care to keep people on the property reasonably safe. In practice, courts judge “reasonable care” by looking for a system: regular inspections, carried out on a schedule, written down at the time, with dates.
The load-bearing word there is scheme. A pattern of ordinary care that existed before anything went wrong and can be produced afterwards.
A scheme you can’t produce is a scheme you didn’t have. That lands badly with most managers I talk to, because they are not careless people. They did the walk. They called the contractor. The paper is what went missing.
What the record has to survive
Your log needs to survive someone hostile reading it closely, which means answering four questions without anyone piecing it together after the fact:
- What was observed, and when. A date and a time, not “March”.
- Who observed it. A name, not a role.
- What was done about it, and when. Including the gap between the two.
- How it was closed. By whom, with what evidence.
Three of those four are timestamps. The most common weakness in a maintenance file is an entry with no defensible date, written up days later from memory and a camera roll.
The everyday version of the same problem
Most of the time this never reaches a lawyer. It reaches a board meeting.
An owner asks why the garage has been leaking since spring. The board asks the manager. The manager knows perfectly well that a contractor attended twice and that the second visit found a different cause, but the account of it lives in a WhatsApp thread, a phone gallery and two emails. Putting it back together takes an evening nobody is paying for.
So the record earns its keep on ordinary Tuesdays, which is when the argument actually happens, long before it ever earns its keep on the worst day.
Where records requests fit
There is a statutory version of this too. An owner is entitled to request records, and the corporation has thirty days to respond. Ontario’s Condominium Authority Tribunal accepted 341 new cases in 2024–25, up from 222 four years earlier, and records disputes remain the largest category it hears.
Those cases are rarely about a corporation hiding something. They are about whether it could put an answer together inside the window. A file that already exists in a consistent shape turns a thirty-day scramble into an export.
Capture on site, not at the desk
Every hour between seeing something and writing it down is an hour in which the date gets fuzzy, the unit number gets uncertain, and the photo loses the context that made it worth taking.
The reports, the board updates, the tribunal response and the defence if it ever comes to that all come out of that one habit.