Anonymised, illustrative composite. An Ontario mechanical contractor on an institutional HVAC retrofit had $210,000 of unforeseen ductwork rerouting the GC refused to certify as a valid change. Rather than suing, the contractor gave notice of adjudication under the Construction Act — and the process ran on its own clock whether the GC cooperated or not.
At a glance
The unforeseen ductwork rerouting was caused by an as-built condition nobody had drawings for — a structural beam relocated in a prior renovation that was never reflected in the record drawings the mechanical contractor priced from. The rerouting added real labour, material and crane time the contractor believed was a straightforward compensable change. The GC disagreed on scope, arguing the original design should have anticipated field conditions, and refused to certify the $210,000 for payment.
With the project still running and the GC unwilling to move, the contractor faced the usual choice: let the dispute sit until the project wrapped and then sue, or force a decision while the work was still fresh and the record was easy to reconstruct. It chose adjudication under the right to adjudicate without the other party’s consent, filing a Notice of Adjudication rather than a statement of claim.
The GC never agreed on an adjudicator, which is a common response when one side would rather the clock not start at all. Under s.13.9(4), if an agreed Registry Adjudicator does not consent within four days of the notice, the party who gave notice can ask ODACC’s Authority to appoint one; under s.13.9(6), the Authority must appoint, subject to consent, no later than seven days after the request. None of that requires the GC’s cooperation to begin, which is the entire point of a right that exists “without the other Party’s consent.”
At $210,000, the claim sits in the fee band where ODACC’s fee schedule applies an hourly adjudicator rate of $300 rather than a flat fee — a detail the contractor confirmed before filing so there were no surprises on cost once the Authority appointed someone.
The right itself is not universal by date: adjudication under Part II.1 of the Construction Act only became available for contracts entered into on or after October 1, 2019, so the first question on any older contract is whether it was signed before or after that line.
$210,000 claimed on the Notice of Adjudication. Roughly five weeks from that notice to a written Determination: the Authority appointed a Registry Adjudicator inside its statutory window, the contractor’s supporting documents were due within five days of the appointment, and the Determination followed within thirty days of that submission. A further two weeks to payment. Had the same $210,000 instead gone straight to a lawsuit, it would have run on a court’s own scheduling timeline — the same dispute, the same dollar figure, and nothing forcing either side to move faster than the docket allowed.
The bind sits in the payment rule that follows the Determination, not just in the right to adjudicate itself: once the Determination issued ordering payment, the losing party had to pay within fifteen days of the Determination issuing. That fifteen-day payment clock is what converted a paper win into cash. A Determination with no enforceable payment deadline attached would have left the contractor exactly where certifying-and-refusing had already left it — holding a document, not the money.
It also mattered that each party bore its own costs regardless of outcome, rather than facing a costs award that could make losing an adjudication more expensive than the original dispute. That made the decision to adjudicate a contained one for the contractor: the exposure was the adjudicator fee at the published hourly rate, not an open-ended legal bill, which is a very different risk-and-reward calculation than deciding whether to start a lawsuit over the same $210,000.
The Determination ordered payment of the full $210,000, and the GC paid inside the fifteen-day window rather than risk enforcement of an unpaid Determination. The dispute never reached a courtroom, and the project finished with the extras booked and closed out rather than carried as an open claim. For the invoicing side of a claim like this, see why a technically correct invoice can still not be a “proper invoice”, and for how a different Ontario trade cleared a lien instead of a payment dispute, see a small GC cleared a vacated lien in ten days.
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