Short answer
Usually not, but at least one Ontario licence can be. Most transfer regimes — liquor, pharmacy, most others — assume the applicant is the licensee or has the licensee’s consent. The Aggregate Resources Act is a named exception: s.18(1) says only “on application, the Minister may transfer a licence”, not on the application of the licensee, and s.18(4) sets out exactly what happens when the applicant does not have consent.
Read what s.18 actually says, not what transfer law usually assumes
s.18(3) covers the ordinary case, where the applicant is the licensee or holds its consent. s.18(4) covers the other case: where “the applicant does not have the licensee’s consent to the transfer”, then “if the Minister proposes to transfer the licence, he or she shall forthwith serve notice of the proposal on the licensee, with reasons”. The statute contemplates a transfer against the holder’s wishes and states the procedure for it — a genuine outlier against most licence-transfer regimes, where the holder’s consent is simply assumed.
The holder is not unprotected, but the protection is procedural
A licensee served under s.18(4) may require a hearing before the Ontario Land Tribunal on serving the Minister within 30 days under s.18(5), and under s.18(8) “the Tribunal may direct the Minister to carry out or rescind his or her proposal”. That turns what looks like a veto into a delay, which prices very differently — a holder with no realistic prospect of using the licence can still impose months of process on a buyer, but cannot simply refuse forever. One gap is worth naming: s.18 states no criteria for granting a transfer. The list governing whether a licence is
issued in the first place, under s.12(1), is not written into s.18, and reading it across into a transfer decision would be an assumption rather than a rule the text supports.
Do not generalise this to other licences
This is a feature of the Aggregate Resources Act specifically, not a general principle of Ontario licensing. Liquor, pharmacy and most other transfer regimes are built around an applicant who is the current holder or has its consent, with no comparable no-consent route. Before pricing a holder’s consent as a veto, or assuming one is required at all, check whether the specific statute governing that licence actually says consent is needed — most do; this one, notably, does not.
Case Files
A pit licence transferred over the licensee’s objection is this exact route, worked through a failed joint venture where the licence-holder priced its consent at $1,600,000 and the transfer went ahead under s.18(4) without it — settling eleven months later at $410,000. For how a court-approved insolvency sale treats a licence differently again, see the next question.
Sources
- • Aggregate Resources Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. A.8 — s.18(1) the transfer power; s.18(3) consent; s.18(4) no consent; s.18(5)–(10) hearing rights and Tribunal powers; s.12(1) the (separate) issuance criteria.
- • Treadstone Law — regulatory approval as a closing condition on an Ontario business sale — general background on structuring approvals as conditions; it assumes an approval process the parties apply into jointly and does not address a no-consent transfer power, which is the point this page turns on.
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