What happens if a required consent or approval hasn't come through by the scheduled closing date?

If the purchase agreement makes that consent — a landlord's consent to a lease assignment, a franchisor's approval, a lender's consent to a discharge — an actual closing condition, closing generally can't complete until it's received, unless the party it protects is willing to waive it and proceed anyway. Where a lease is involved, the Commercial Tenancies Act generally means a landlord can't unreasonably withhold consent to assignment unless the lease itself says otherwise, but that doesn't set a timeline for when consent actually has to arrive.

In practice, parties often negotiate a short extension of the closing date rather than letting the whole deal collapse over one outstanding consent, particularly where there's every reason to believe it's coming, just not yet. If the agreement has a hard outside closing date that's about to pass, the party still waiting needs to decide, with legal advice, whether to extend by a written amendment, waive the requirement, or treat the agreement as at an end — the agreement's own wording on outside dates controls which options are actually available.