Two of these clocks are contractual conditions on the carrier’s liability. The third is a statutory limitation period. People miss claims by assuming they are the same thing.
Key takeaways
In British Columbia the Specified Conditions of Carriage provide that a carrier is not liable for loss, damage or delay unless written notice, setting out particulars of the origin, destination and date of shipment and the estimated amount claimed, is given to the originating or delivering carrier within 60 days after delivery of the goods, or within 9 months after the date of shipment where delivery was not made; and that the final statement of the claim must be filed within 9 months after the date of shipment, together with a copy of the paid freight bill.
Those are conditions, not deadlines for convenience. If the notice does not go, the liability does not attach.
Road carriage in Canada is regulated province by province. The federal Conditions of Carriage Regulations bridge the gap for extra-provincial trucking by providing that the applicable conditions and limitations of liability are those of the province in which the transport originates, and that where a province has no such enactment, they are those agreed to by the undertaking.
So the operative question is never “what is the Canadian rule”. It is “where did this load start”. Manitoba’s Motor Carrier Division states the same position and notes that its own Bills of Lading and Uniform Conditions of Carriage Regulation lets carriers limit their liability on goods transported. Read the province of origin’s Articles before you calendar anything.
Ontario is not silent either. Its own Ontario Regulation 643/05 (Carriage of Goods) deems the Uniform Conditions of Carriage a term of every contract of carriage, and Article 12 sets the same structure as British Columbia’s: written notice within 60 days of delivery, or nine months where delivery never happened, with the final statement of claim due nine months after the shipment date. A load that starts in Ontario is not exempt from these clocks — it runs on Ontario’s own version of them.
The same Ontario Articles also cap what a timely claim actually recovers. Absent a declared value on the face of the contract of carriage, Article 9 limits the carrier’s liability to the lesser of the value of the goods at the place and time of shipment and $4.41 per kilogram of the shipment’s total weight — so hitting the notice deadline on an undeclared high-value load can still leave you recovering a fraction of the loss.
Delivery starts it. Not the day the damage is noticed, not the day the customer complains, not the day your claims person gets to it. If a receiver signs on the 3rd and the shortage surfaces during reconciliation on the 50th, you have ten days, not sixty.
That is why the notation on the delivery record matters so much. A British Columbia bill of lading must contain a provision stipulating whether or not the goods are received in apparent good order and condition, and for household goods a conspicuous statement that a consignee’s signature does not preclude a later claim within the time limit.
Nine months from the shipment date does two jobs. It is the notice deadline where the goods never arrived at all — a theft, a total loss, a load that vanished into an interline — and it is the deadline for the final statement of claim in every case.
Both run from shipment, not from delivery and not from discovery. On a long-tail problem this is the tighter constraint: a load shipped in January is out of time in October even if the shortage only surfaced in September.
Giving notice preserves the claim. It does not preserve the lawsuit. Limitation periods are provincial statute. In Ontario the general rule is two years to start a proceeding, and the two years run from the day the claim was discovered rather than the day the loss occurred — the discovery principle. A written demand does not pause it.
The practical effect is that a cargo file can be alive under the limitation period and dead under the conditions of carriage, or the reverse. They are independent, and the shorter one usually decides the file.
Équité Association describes a cargo fraud pattern that runs directly into these clocks. A load is diverted, part of the cargo is removed, and the paperwork is recreated — including the bill of lading — with the quantity changed, so the receiver signs for the reduced amount. Équité notes that the shortage often remains undetected for weeks, until discrepancies arise during the payment reconciliation process.
By the time the reconciliation runs, the 60-day notice clock may be nearly spent. The operational answer is not legal: it is to reconcile received quantities against tendered quantities within days rather than at month end.
Worked example: three dates that decided a claim
A shipment leaves Kelowna on 4 February and delivers in Ontario on 7 February. The receiver signs clean. On 19 March a cycle count shows four cases missing.
The 60-day notice clock started on 7 February, so it expires on 8 April. Written notice goes to the originating and delivering carriers on 24 March, comfortably inside it, setting out origin, destination, shipment date and an estimated claim.
The final statement of claim is due nine months from 4 February — the shipment date, not the delivery date — so 4 November. The claim is filed with the paid freight bill in June.
Had the count run at year end instead, the notice window would have closed on 8 April with nothing sent, and the carrier would not have been liable regardless of what happened to the four cases. The limitation period for suing would still have had well over a year to run, which is exactly the trap: the longer clock is not the one that mattered.
Parties can and do agree to different contractual terms, and whether a particular extension binds is a contract question — the general framework for enforceability of clauses that limit or vary liability applies. Do not assume a helpful email from a claims adjuster has changed the Article.
Not by itself. An acknowledgment that the carrier is looking into it is not an extension of the notice period. If the investigation is going to run long, get the extension in writing.
That is not a carriage claim under these Articles — there was no shipment. It is a contract claim, and the limitation period is the one that governs.
They govern the claim against the carrier, which is usually the claim that matters. Your own exposure runs on your contract and, where relevant, your insurer’s notice conditions — and late notice to an insurer is its own way to lose a good claim.
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