Escalator Field Guide
Elevator Field Guide
iOSOntario elevator outage reporting
The only public record of elevator outages in Canada. It started on 1 July 2022, four years after the Act that created it, and it now holds 1,271 of them.
In Ontario a building’s elevator become a public record, and we have found nowhere else in Canada that does the same. It started on 1 July 2022, which is neither of the two dates usually given for it. Ontario is also often described as the first place in the world to put legal deadlines on elevator repairs. It has no such deadline.
Two marks to know: explains a term right here. A pill-shaped link, like O. Reg. 209/01, opens a source document in a new tab. Ontario’s e-Laws pages build themselves in the browser, so they cannot be auto-scrolled to a passage. Where that matters, the link says which section to look for.
The question this page answers: when did Ontario’s outage reporting duty actually start, who owes it, and what happens to what gets reported?
2018 is not the date. The Act got Royal Assent on 7 May 2018 and made news that week, but its elevator provisions were deliberately held back. The Act’s own commencement section put them off to a day named later by proclamation.
2021 is not the date either. The regulation creating the duty was filed on 16 April 2021 and published the same day, which is why that date gets quoted. It sat there readable and not binding for fourteen and a half months.
1 July 2022 is the answer. That is the proclamation date, and it is what both regulations were waiting on. e-Laws states it in the Act’s amendment table and again in an editorial note on the regulation.
There is no repair deadline in Ontario, and there never has been. The Act created the power to set one. No regulation has used it. The 7 and 14 day repair limits people remember came from a private member’s bill that did not pass, and the study the government acted on specifically replaced them with reporting.
Nobody could agree whether there was a problem, because nobody had the numbers
TSSA answers this in its own FAQ, and the answer is narrower than people expect. The requirement was created “to measure elevator availability”, and it quotes the study behind it: “the first step in any amendment to policy and/or regulation is a definition and measurement process for (elevator) ‘availability’.” That is the whole intent. Not to fix anything directly. To find out.
Read the 2017 study and it is obvious why. Two sets of numbers were in front of the province and they did not agree.
The industry’s numbers
National Elevator and Escalator Association members, about 75% of the Ontario market, reported over 99% operational time. Contractor data said most elevators are repaired within 24 hours, and that roughly 1% of devices have an outage longer than a week in a year. Service calls were down 15% over three years and entrapments down 18 to 20%.
The owners’ numbers
Of 250 building owners surveyed, one in five reported availability under 95%, which is about 18 days or more out of service in a year. Condominiums were worst at 93%. Most of the bad ones were in the GTA. There was no correlation with the age of the device. TSSA’s own estimate sat between the two at 97%, or roughly 10 days a year.
- Nobody was responsible for the question. The study’s words: “No public sector organization currently manages availability across residential and institutional buildings,” and there was “an acute absence of publicly available information on the current state of elevator availability”.
- Maintenance compliance was at a low. Compliance with TSSA’s annual periodic and scheduled maintenance tasks was 22% across all buildings and about 20% for residential ones, and TSSA had found that poor compliance there usually signals low compliance with other safety requirements.
- Complaints were rising. The City of Toronto’s Municipal Licensing and Standards Division received 331 elevator complaints in 2017, of which 59% were about non-operational or malfunctioning elevators.
- And it is not a safety law. This is the part that gets skipped. The study ran a risk assessment and found the risk of injury or fatality from elevators not being available “well below acceptable risk thresholds”. Asked directly whether outage reporting will make elevators safer, TSSA’s FAQ does not say yes. It says the data “will help TSSA and the Ontario Government better understand the frequency, volume of outages and the factors surrounding their occurrences”.
So the honest description is that this is a consumer-protection and data-gathering measure, aimed at people who cannot get to their own front door, not at a safety hazard. Ontario legislated to find out how bad the problem is before deciding what to do about it. Which is also why what got made was a reporting rule and not a repair deadline.
From a private member’s bill in 2017 to a duty in 2022
Bill 109 wants repairs done in 14 days
MPP Han Dong tables the Reliable Elevators Act, 2017. Its own explanatory note: an elevator that breaks down “must be repaired within 14 days for most buildings, seven days for long-term care homes and retirement homes.” This is where the deadline everybody remembers comes from. It never became law.
Cunningham swaps the deadline for reporting
TSSA engages Retired Superior Court Justice Douglas Cunningham, supported by Deloitte’s Public Sector Strategy team, to write an independent study. It lands as the TSSA Elevator Availability Study. Recommendation 7 asks for reporting of outages over 48 hours, and ends with the line that decided the next five years: “Note that this replaces the 7/14 day repair timeline recommendation from Bill 109”.
Royal Assent, and almost nothing starts
Bill 8, the Access to Consumer Credit Reports and Elevator Availability Act, 2018, is assented to. One statute, amending two entirely unrelated things. Section 25(2) holds the elevator regulation-making powers back: they “come into force on a day to be named by proclamation of the Lieutenant Governor.” Nobody could report anything yet, and nobody had to.
The regulation is filed, and still does not bind
O. Reg. 290/21 adds section 38.1 to O. Reg. 209/01: the outage reporting duty, in full, with all fourteen reportable items. Made 15 April, filed 16 April, on e-Laws the same day, in the Gazette on 1 May. Its own section 4 says it comes into force on the later of the proclamation and the filing. The proclamation had not happened.
A second regulation, for one changed name
O. Reg. 272/22 exists to swap one reference, from the Long-Term Care Homes Act, 2007 to the Fixing Long-Term Care Act, 2021. It waits on the same proclamation. For about three months, e-Laws is carrying a not-yet-in-force amendment to a not-yet-in-force section.
Proclamation, and everything lands at once
Subsections 22(2) and (3) of the 2018 Act come into force, and both regulations come into force with them. e-Laws prints it twice: in the Act’s own amendment table as 2018, c. 7, s. 22 (2, 3) - 01/07/2022, and as a note on the regulation reading “On July 1, 2022, the day subsection 22 (2) … comes into force, the Regulation is amended by adding the following section”. Four years and nearly two months after Royal Assent.
1,271 outages on the public record, and no repair deadline
The register is open to anyone. The power to set repair-time standards, sitting in the same Act since the same day, has still not been used by any regulation.
The owner reports. Not the contractor.
This is the single thing most often got wrong, and it is worth knowing because it changed between the recommendation and the law.
What Cunningham asked for
“Require contractors to report outages over 48 hours or when 50% of the elevators are out of service, with a defined action plan to restore service.”
What section 38.1 actually says
The owner of the elevator reports. There is no half-a-building trigger, only the 48-hour one. And nothing requires an action plan. TSSA’s own FAQ for contractors puts it flatly: “Do I need to report elevator outages for elevators that I repair? No. Only the owner or licensee can report an elevator outage.”
What a contractor can do
Disagree with what an owner filed and you are not stuck with it. TSSA’s contractor FAQ says the maintenance contractor for a device can create a login and add a comment on the report. Those comments are not shown to the public; the owner or licensee sees them. It is a correction channel rather than a right of reply.
- Which buildings. An elevator in a long-term care home, or in a building used partly or entirely for residential occupancy. Residential occupancy takes its meaning from the Building Code, O. Reg. 332/12.
- What counts as an outage. The regulation defines it as “a period of time that is 48 hours or longer in which the elevator is out of service.” Note the wording. TSSA’s own infographic says more than 48 hours, which is not the same thing: a unit down for exactly 48 hours is reportable under the regulation and not under the leaflet. Go by the regulation.
- When. No later than 30 days after the day the elevator is returned to service. The clock runs from the fix, not from the failure.
- A modernisation counts. So does a unit TSSA removed from service, and one the owner chose to take out. If it was down 48 hours or more, it is reportable, whatever the reason.
- An elevator on service for a move does not count, in TSSA’s words, “provided it is serving its intended function”.
- An outage caused by an incident needs two reports. The outage goes in the portal and the incident is reported separately, because TSSA collects different data for each. Filing one does not file the other.
Fourteen things go in. Ten come out.
Section 38.1(3) lists what a report contains. Section 38.1(4) then says TSSA “shall publish on its website the information referred to in paragraphs 1 to 10”. Not 11 to 14. We checked that split against the live register rather than taking it on trust, and the public export carries items 1 to 10 and stops.
Published
1. Address. 2. Number of elevators in the building. 3. Installation number. 4. Floors served. 5. Date and time the outage started and ended. 6. The cause, including anything that prolonged it. 7. Year installed. 8. Date returned to service after the most recent major alteration. 9. Date of the most recent control system replacement. 10. The maintenance interval.
Collected, not published
11. Elevator manufacturer. 12. Control system manufacturer. 13. The maintaining contractor’s name. 14. For whoever repaired it: the contractor’s name, the date and time they were first contacted, and the date and time they first attended.
Read item 14 again if you work in the trade
Your response time on a 48-hour-plus outage is being recorded by the regulator, by name, on every reportable job. It is filed by the building owner, so you do not write it and you do not see it unless you go looking. It is then deliberately kept off the public register by the statute itself, which is a design decision rather than an oversight in how somebody built the website. The building’s maintenance interval, the age of the unit and the stated cause are public. Who was called and how long they took is not.
There is no fine for not reporting
Ontario made two regulations that day, not one. O. Reg. 289/21 came into force on 1 July 2022 alongside the reporting duty, and it is the administrative penalty regime for elevating devices: an assessor can order a penalty of $5,000 against a contractor, $3,000 against an owner or licence holder, and $1,000 against anyone else, payable within 30 days.
It applies only to the provisions listed in its schedule. That schedule names 73 provisions of O. Reg. 209/01. It runs through clause 38 (a) and clause 38 (b), the duties of a passenger elevator owner, and then jumps straight to subsection 40 (1). Section 38.1, the outage reporting duty, is not in it. The string does not appear anywhere in the regulation.
What can actually happen to an owner who says nothing
TSSA’s own answer: failing to report “would constitute a violation of the regulation”, TSSA “may issue orders requiring the elevator owner or licensee to report the outage”, and if inspection orders are needed because of it, “TSSA will bill the elevator owner or licensees for the inspection”. An order and an invoice. Not a penalty.
And the public has no lever at all. There is no way for a resident to file an outage. TSSA tells them that if they believe an elevator was down 48 hours or more and it has been over 30 days, they should contact the elevator owner and ask them to report it. The person who benefits from silence is the person you have to ask.
One more limit worth knowing before you go looking: the register is historical only. In TSSA’s words, it “does not show real-time information about elevators that are currently out of service”. An outage reported at the outside edge of the rules can be a month and a half old before it appears. It cannot tell a tenant whether their lift is working today, and it was never built to.
What four years of reports look like
The register is open at ea.tssa.org with no login, searchable by postal code, and it exports to a spreadsheet. Everything below is from that export, taken on 6 September 2026.
- 1,271 records. Against TSSA’s own count of “almost 20,000 passenger elevators across more than 10,000 residential and institutional buildings in Ontario”. Draw your own conclusion; we are not going to draw one for you.
- Median outage: 10 days. The average is 20.3 days, dragged up by a long tail. 203 outages ran past 30 days, 47 past 90, and two past a year. The longest single record is 722 days.
- Median year of installation: 1980. The oldest unit in the data went in in 1960.
- 1,203 of the 1,271 were on monthly maintenance. Quarterly accounts for 53. So this is not a story about units nobody was visiting.
- The stated causes are lopsided. “Other Unplanned Repair or Upgrade” covers 835 of them, which tells you almost nothing. Then Safety Shutdown by Mechanic (151), Other Planned Repair or Upgrade (75), Elevator Modernization (52), Water Damage or Flood (50), Taken Out due to Investigation (40). Safety Shutdown by TSSA: 7.
- Reporting falls off a cliff in March 2025. Monthly counts ran between 18 and 49 through the whole of 2024. Then 32 in January 2025, 20 in February, and 3 in March. It stays in single digits for most of the rest of that year and only partly recovers through 2026. We have found no explanation on TSSA’s site and we are not going to invent one. Worth reading next to the section above: nothing in the regulation fines an owner for not filing.
- Three records pre-date the duty. One outage starting in 2020 and two in 2021 are in there, before anyone was obliged to file.
TSSA’s own words at the foot of the register, which belong here too: “outage information is provided by building owners, and it is not independently verified by TSSA for completeness or accuracy.” Fifteen records are flagged as withdrawn.
Ontario has the power and has never used it
The 2018 Act added five clauses to section 34(1) of the Technical Standards and Safety Act, the section listing what the province may make regulations about. Setting them beside what exists today is the clearest way to see what Ontario chose.
O. Reg. 290/21, s. 3
in effect
s. 38.1(4)
How firm is the “no regulation found”? Seventeen regulations sit under the Technical Standards and Safety Act and none of them is an availability or repair-standards regulation. The word “availability” does not appear anywhere in O. Reg. 209/01. That is a search of the published record, which is not the same as a statement from the ministry, so we have said what we checked rather than asserting a negative we cannot fully prove. If a repair-time regulation is ever made, it belongs on the list of regulations under the Act, and that list is on the Act’s own e-Laws page.
Does anyone else make owners report outages?
Not that we can find, and the study that led to this law says the same. Cunningham looked at six places chosen for high-rise density comparable to Ontario’s: Chicago, Hong Kong, London, New York City, Singapore and Vancouver. His finding, in one line: “Elevator regulatory authorities across the six core jurisdictions examined do not define or regulate availability.” More broadly, “the focus of the current legislation across jurisdictions is on user safety or accessibility, rather than availability.”
Where “first in the world” comes from, and what it actually said
Ontario was widely reported in 2018 as the first jurisdiction in the world to regulate elevator repair times. The line traces to the study, and it is conditional: “The Ontario government would be the first jurisdiction in the world to establish regulatory requirements for measurable, non-safety related elevator service issues (for instance, minimum repair times…)”. Ontario did not make that regulation. What it did make was the reporting rule on this page, which is a real first of its own, and a much smaller one.
What other places do instead is worth knowing, because it is a different question being answered. Almost everywhere reports incidents, meaning something went wrong dangerously. Ontario reports outages, meaning the thing was not working. Those are not the same duty.
- Singapore went furthest, and went the other way. As the study recorded it in 2017, its Building and Construction Authority had brought in a “Permit to Operate” system, changed incident reporting requirements, tightened enforcement and raised penalties on lift contractors for maintenance breaches. Singapore has legislated again since and the direction of travel is incident reporting on a clock, not downtime. We are not putting the current figures here: the BCA circular describing them is no longer at its published address and the regulations did not come up on Singapore’s own statutes site, so we could not check them against the source.
- New York City publishes a great deal about elevators. It is inspections, compliance filings and violations through the Department of Buildings, carried on the city’s open data portal. None of it is a record of how long a lift was out of service.
- Chicago, as of the study, put the obligation on annual inspection certification: owners report the state of the device and its inspection status to the Department of Buildings.
- London had the closest thing to a public availability figure, and it was not a regulator doing it. The study cites Transport for London publishing lift availability for its own station lifts, defined as “the total hours elevators are working as a percentage of total scheduled service hours”. An operator reporting on its own equipment is a different thing from a province making every landlord report on theirs. The page the study links is a dead address today.
- Ontario municipalities already required elevators to be kept operational through property standards by-laws before any of this, in Burlington, Hamilton, London, Mississauga, Niagara Falls and elsewhere. The study’s verdict on them: “There are no specific corresponding measures to enable monitoring or proactive enforcement of these requirements.”
- Elsewhere in Canada, we checked and found nothing comparable. Vancouver, one of Cunningham’s six, still today tells residents only that building owners must keep elevators “in working condition at all times” and gives them a complaint line. No threshold, no filing, no register.
The other half of the same Act took eight years
Bill 8 amended two unrelated things: elevator availability and consumer credit reports. The elevator half was proclaimed on 1 July 2022. The credit half waited longer still. Order in Council 1024/2025, ordered 31 July 2025, names 1 July 2026 for a batch of the Consumer Reporting Act sections in the same statute.
That order in council is also the only one e-Laws lists against this Act, which is worth knowing if you go looking for the 2022 proclamation. We did not find it. The 1 July 2022 date is stated by e-Laws itself in two places and that is what this page cites; it is not a date we have seen an order in council for.
Where this sits
O. Reg. 209/01 has been amended three times in twenty-five years, which is only strange until you see how Ontario actually moves its code: Ontario’s code adoption timeline covers that, edition by edition. The maintenance interval on every one of the 1,271 reports comes out of a written programme, and maintenance control programs explains who sets it and why it differs by province. For the regulator and the edition in force anywhere else, find your code. Terms defined plainly: the glossary.
Every source behind this page
- This is a research summary, not legal advice. For a binding answer about a specific building or a specific report, ask TSSA.
- The 1 July 2022 date is e-Laws’ own. It appears in the Act’s amendment table and in an editorial note on the regulation. We did not find the order in council behind it, and we have not pretended otherwise.
- “No repair-time regulation” is a search result, not a ministry statement. It is based on the published list of regulations under the Act and the text of O. Reg. 209/01, both checked on 6 September 2026.
- The register numbers are a snapshot, and the data is owner-supplied. TSSA does not verify it for completeness or accuracy, and says so. The March 2025 drop in reporting is unexplained; if you know why, we would like to hear it.
- “Nowhere else in Canada” is a search, not a proof. We checked the other provinces and territories for a comparable duty or a public register and found none, and Vancouver was one of the six places the 2017 study examined directly. A negative like this cannot be closed off completely. If your jurisdiction has one, tell us.
- The comparison with other places is dated, and says so where it is. The six-jurisdiction scan was done in 2017 and is quoted as a 2017 finding. Two of the sources behind it, Transport for London’s lift availability page and the Singapore circular, are dead addresses now. Vancouver and New York we checked ourselves on 6 September 2026.
Ontario changes its code without changing its regulation. That mechanism is why O. Reg. 209/01 has been amended only three times since 2001.
Ontario’s code timeline →The maintenance interval on every one of those 1,271 reports comes from somewhere. How a maintenance control program sets it, province by province.
Maintenance control programs →Working to the elevator code on the job?
The Elevator Field Guide is the elevator code in plain English, searchable and offline. It covers the code, not Ontario’s outage reporting law, which is on this page and nowhere else.
