Conditional Building Permits: A Very Useful Tool

There are many situations in which a developer may need to begin construction before a certain date, but cannot get their building permit in time. In Ontario that is usually because they cannot yet meet some very minor "applicable law" requirement that, according the Building Code Act, they must comply with in order to obtain the permit.¹

A conditional building permit can often get around this problem, even though many municipalities in Ontario use them so infrequently that they seem barely aware that they have the authority to issue them. Conditional building permits are authorized pursuant to s. 8(3) of the Building Code Act, and allow an applicant to proceed with construction even though all "applicable law" requirements necessary to obtain a building permit have not yet been met. Instead, there is only a much shorter and less onerous list of "applicable law" requirements that must be met.² Even in larger municipalities conditional building permits are not always