An easement is a legal right one property holds to use part of a neighbouring property for a specific purpose — crossing it, running a pipe through it, or draining onto it — without that piece of land changing owners. “A true easement needs two pieces of land in different ownership: one that takes the benefit and one that carries the burden”
The benefiting property is the dominant tenement; the property carrying the easement is the servient tenement, and the right runs with the land — it binds whoever owns the servient property next, not just the person who granted it.
An easement is not a licence to do anything on the burdened land. The owner of the servient land “keeps ownership of the strip and can use it, but cannot substantially interfere with the right — no permanent structures, no locked gate without a key, no landscaping that makes the way unusable”. A fence built across a registered right-of-way is a breach even if the fence owner also owns the land it sits on.
Most Ontario easements are registered on title and turn up in a straightforward title search. A smaller category does not: “Under Ontario’s limitations legislation, twenty years of open, uninterrupted use as of right could ripen into a prescriptive easement”, but this route is mostly closed for modern transactions, because “The Land Titles Act stops that clock: prescriptive rights cannot be acquired against land registered under it, and virtually all Ontario land has now been converted into that system”. The narrow exception: “A right that had already matured before the parcel was converted to land titles can survive the conversion even though nothing was ever registered against the property” — which is why an old survey or abstract of title can still matter on a legacy parcel.
A backyard is crossed by a registered right-of-way letting the neighbour behind reach a laneway. The listing clients want to build a shed across part of it. Because the easement is registered, it will show on a title search whether or not the sellers mention it — better to disclose it and show where it actually runs, via a current survey, than let the buyer’s lawyer find it mid-deal. A shed built across it would very likely count as the kind of use-blocking landscaping the servient owner isn’t permitted to create, exposing the sellers to a removal claim from the neighbour even after closing.
See also: encroachment, restrictive covenants and the Alberta real property report.
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