Environmental orders are not addressed to whoever is at fault. They are addressed to whoever owns or controls the property today.
Short answer
Yes, potentially — and share versus asset does less protective work here than buyers often expect. Section 18(1) of the Environmental Protection Act lets a Director, by written order, require action from “a person who owns or owned or who has or had management or control of an undertaking or property.” That is a description of a position relative to the property, not a description of who polluted it. A buyer who takes title in an asset deal, or takes operating control of a contaminated site, is squarely inside that class the moment the deal closes. See Environmental Protection Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. E.19, s.18(1).
The leading authority on this makes the point starkly. In Kawartha Lakes (City) v. Ontario (Environment), a municipality that everyone agreed “bore no responsibility for the spill” was still ordered to remediate its own land, because “this was a no fault order.” The Court of Appeal upheld excluding the City’s evidence that others were at fault, on the basis that fault says nothing about whether the environment gets protected if the order is revoked. See Kawartha Lakes (City) v. Ontario (Environment), 2013 ONCA 310.
A record of site condition, filed before closing under Part XV.1 of the Act, blocks most orders for contamination that predates it: once filed, “no order shall be issued to any of the following persons under section 7, 8, 12, 17, 18, 97, 157 or 157.1 in respect of a contaminant that was discharged into the natural environment before the certification date.” It is a real shield, but a conditional one — it fails if the filing contained false information, if the contaminant later migrates off the property, or where the current use becomes more sensitive than the certified use. See Environmental Protection Act, s.168.7(1). A share purchase does not change this analysis at all: the corporation being bought keeps whatever exposure it already had, regardless of who owns its shares.
This particular case-file cluster does not include a contamination file of its own — the mechanic above is drawn directly from the statute and the Court of Appeal. For a worked deal-level example of a statute overriding a reasonable, well-documented allocation of risk, see Case Files: a price loaded onto the land under the building — a different statute, the same shape of surprise.
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