Blog · Cambridge

Commercial lot snow removal in Cambridge: slip-and-fall liability basics and Ontario's 60-day notice rule

Under Ontario's Occupiers' Liability Act, whoever controls a Cambridge parking lot, plaza frontage or industrial yard owes a duty of reasonable care to the people walking across it, and since 2021 anyone injured by snow or ice has to serve written notice within 60 days to preserve a claim. A snow contract and a visit log are how a business shows it took that care.

Last updated October 24, 2026 · Reviewed by the Cambridge Snow Removal team

Who is liable when someone slips on ice in a Cambridge parking lot?

The occupier, which under Ontario's Occupiers' Liability Act means whoever has control of the premises, usually the property owner, the tenant business, or both. The Act places a duty on the occupier to take reasonable care to see that people coming onto the premises are reasonably safe while there, and the condition of the premises in winter is squarely inside that duty. A snow contractor hired to clear the lot can also be named in a claim, which is why the contract between the two has to be clear about who does what, and when.

The standard is reasonable care, not perfection. Nobody can keep a lot on Hespeler Road bare through a freezing-rain event at 3 a.m. What a court looks at is whether there was a sensible system in place, whether it was followed, and whether anyone can prove it. That is the whole purpose of the paperwork described below.

The 60-day notice rule for snow and ice injuries

Section 6.1 of the Occupiers' Liability Act, added by the Occupiers' Liability Amendment Act, 2020, says no action may be brought for damages for personal injury caused by snow or ice unless written notice of the claim, including the date, time and location of the occurrence, is served within 60 days after the injury. The amendment received Royal Assent on December 8, 2020 and has since been proclaimed in force. The details, as set out in the legislation:

• Notice must be served by personal service or by registered mail, on at least one of the occupier or an independent contractor the occupier employed to remove snow or ice during the relevant period.
• An occupier who receives notice must pass a copy, the same way, to any other occupier of the premises during that period and to any snow and ice contractor it employed. A contractor who receives notice must pass it to the occupier that hired it.
• Once notice reaches any one of those people, the 60-day limit is satisfied for all of them, even a defendant who never received it directly.
• Missing the deadline does not bar a claim where the injured person has died, or where a judge finds a reasonable excuse and the defendant was not prejudiced in its defence.

For a Cambridge business this cuts two ways. It means a claim that arrives nine months after a fall with no earlier notice is open to a defence most other injury claims do not have. It also means that if a registered letter about a fall lands on your desk, you have an obligation to forward it to your snow contractor promptly, and your contractor has the same obligation back to you.

What a commercial snow contract in Cambridge should say

A lot contract is a document before it is a service. The contractor we book for Cambridge writes industrial and plaza lot contracts that state:

1. Trigger depth, in centimetres, and whether clearing runs overnight, between shifts or during business hours.
2. Priority order on the site: which docks, lanes, entrances and accessible parking spaces are cleared first.
3. Hand work: entrances, walkways, steps and the public sidewalk, with the City's 36-hour sidewalk rule in mind. In the Galt, Hespeler and Preston BIA cores even a curb-faced storefront sidewalk is the owner's job, because the City excludes those cores from the sidewalks it clears.
4. Ice control between storms: the product, the application rate, and the temperature at which sand replaces salt. The Region of Waterloo says rock salt does not work below about -10 C and that over-application does not make a surface safer, and the City of Cambridge limits its own salt use to protect drinking water, so a contract that salts by habit is both wasteful and no help in a claim.
5. Snow stacking: where piles go so they do not block sightlines, fire routes, accessible spaces or the trailer turning radius, and when stacked snow is hauled off and at whose cost. Snow may not be pushed onto the road; section 181 of Ontario's Highway Traffic Act prohibits depositing snow or ice on a roadway without written permission.
6. Insurance: the contractor's liability coverage and WSIB status, and who is named on whose policy.
7. Records: that every visit is logged with date, time, conditions, work done and product applied, and that the log is available to the owner on request.

Why the visit log is the most important page

If a claim is made, the question becomes what the lot looked like at the time of the fall and what had been done about it. A dated log showing the lot was plowed at 4:10 a.m., salted at 6:30 a.m. when the temperature rose to -4 C, and inspected again at noon is evidence of a system being followed. No log means the business is relying on memory against a claimant with a photograph. Ask any contractor you are considering how they record visits and whether you can see a sample. Pair it with your own quick records: a staff member noting conditions at opening, and photographs of any problem spot and its fix.

Cambridge's industrial parks off Franklin, Boxwood, Eagle Street North and the Pinebush corridor run on shifts, so the relevant time is often the shift change in the dark. Plazas in the three downtowns have the opposite problem: heavy pedestrian traffic on frontages that the City does not clear. Both are reasons to put the sidewalk and the entrances in the contract explicitly rather than assuming they are included with the lot.

What this means for your quote

Bring a site plan, your hours of operation and any accessibility requirements to the site visit. The contractor will walk the lot, agree the stacking locations and the priority order, and put all of it in writing with the logging commitment. Smaller plazas along Hespeler Road and storefront frontages in Galt, Preston and Hespeler get the same scope at a smaller scale. None of this is legal advice; if you have had a fall on your property, speak to your insurer and a lawyer promptly, because the notice clock may already be running. For planning ranges see the Cambridge snow removal cost page, or send the site details here.

Sources

• Occupiers' Liability Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. O.2 - Government of Ontario (e-Laws)
• Bill 118, Occupiers' Liability Amendment Act, 2020 (Royal Assent text) - Legislative Assembly of Ontario
• Winter maintenance and snowplowing - City of Cambridge
• Salt management - Region of Waterloo
• Highway Traffic Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. H.8, s. 181 - Government of Ontario