Ontario legislates a floor under a landlord’s discretion. British Columbia and Alberta do not — and the absence is not an oversight in either province’s statute book.
Short answer
Neither province has it. BC’s Commercial Tenancy Act, Law and Equity Act and Property Law Act contain no equivalent to Ontario’s deemed reasonableness proviso, and Alberta has no commercial tenancies statute at all — its King’s Printer catalogue lists a Residential Tenancies Act, which by its own terms “applies only to tenancies of residential premises,” and a Landlord’s Rights on Bankruptcy Act, which is not a general tenancies statute. See Residential Tenancies Act (Alberta), s.2(1). Outside insolvency, a buyer in Vancouver or Calgary is managing a different risk than a buyer in Toronto: no statute limits the landlord’s discretion, so the lease’s own wording is the only source of any reasonableness standard at all.
What both provinces do legislate is narrower, and it is insolvency-specific. BC’s Commercial Tenancy Act s.29(3) lets a court override a consent covenant on a trustee’s application where the tenant is bankrupt, on condition the transferee “deposit with the landlord a sum equal to 3 months’ rent, or supply to the landlord a guarantee bond approved by the court.” See Commercial Tenancy Act (BC), s.29. A solvent buyer of a solvent business gets nothing from that section.
BC’s Property Law Act shows the legislature knows how to write this duty when it wants to — s.24(4) requires a mortgagee or vendor under an agreement for sale not to “unreasonably refuse to grant the mortgagee’s or vendor’s approval under this section.” That duty reaches a mortgagee and a vendor, not a landlord, which is why it shows the omission for leases is a choice, not an oversight. See Property Law Act (BC), s.24(4). And a consent, once given, is narrow: the Law and Equity Act s.29(1) says it “extends only to the permission actually given.” See Law and Equity Act (BC), s.29(1).
Case Files: the relief window that closed when the Crown sold the lease is an Ontario file, and the mechanism it turns on — a lease reverting on the tenant’s dissolution — is corporate law, not landlord consent, so the province-specific gap here does not change its outcome.
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