Blocking a Neighbour's Right of Way in Stoney Creek

The situation

Sana bought a small rural property on the edge of Stoney Creek to keep farm equipment and a few animals, working days as a farm worker on a nearby operation. A gravel laneway ran along the back of her lot, connecting the concession road to a rear parcel owned by her neighbour, Giulia, an administrative assistant who used the laneway a few times a month to reach a pasture she leased out for grazing to a local rancher, Rosa. The right to use that laneway was not an informal favour — it was a registered right of way, a legal easement noted on both properties' title, giving Giulia's parcel (the "dominant" land, the one that benefits) a permanent right to cross Sana's parcel (the "servient" land, the one that carries the burden) along a defined strip.

For the first year, neither woman thought much about it. Then the laneway needed regrading after a wet spring washed out a section, and a disagreement over who should pay for it turned into months of silence. Sana, frustrated at footing a gravel bill she felt should have been shared, put up a locked gate across the laneway and began storing round hay bales along the strip. She believed Giulia had barely used the right of way in the past two years and assumed it had effectively lapsed. It had not. Six weeks later, Sana was served with a Small Claims Court claim naming her as defendant, seeking a court declaration that the right of way still existed, an order that she remove the gate and bales, and damages for the cost Giulia said she had incurred working around the blocked access. Sana came to Treadstone Law needing to know how much of that claim she actually had to answer for.

The legal problem

Two separate questions were tangled together in Giulia's claim, and they needed to be pulled apart before anything else. The first was whether the right of way still existed at all. Registered easements do not expire just because they go unused for a while — courts have long recognized that a dominant owner's occasional or seasonal use, especially for something like grazing access, does not amount to abandonment. Abandonment requires much clearer evidence that the owner intended to give up the right permanently, not simply that they used it less often in a given year. On the facts Sana described, there was no realistic argument that the easement had lapsed. That mattered, because it meant the gate and the hay bales were not a defensible response to a dead right — they were an obstruction of a live one.

The second question was the money. Giulia's claim, filed for roughly $26,000, was built from three pieces: about $14,000 for trucking feed and equipment around the blocked laneway over the fourteen months the gate had been up, about $7,000 for the value of her own time spent managing the workaround, and about $5,000 as an estimate for what it would cost to formalize an alternate access route if the original one could not be restored. Some of that was defensible loss flowing directly from the blockage. Some of it was speculative or overstated — the cost of an alternate route that was never actually built, and a time-value figure with no supporting record. There was also the original grievance that had started the whole dispute: the laneway had never had a written agreement about who paid for maintenance, and that gap was arguably as much Giulia's problem to fix going forward as it was Sana's fault for the blockage. Self-help — physically blocking an easement instead of asking a court to resolve a maintenance dispute — is rarely a winning strategy, but it does not mean the other side's claim is worth everything they ask for.

What we did

1. Reviewed the registered easement instrument on title. The strip of land, its width, and its permitted use were all clearly described in the original registration. There was no ambiguity for Sana to lean on, and no realistic argument that the right of way had been extinguished by non-use.
2. Advised Sana early that the gate had to come down regardless of how the rest of the case went. Continuing to block a confirmed right of way while the claim was pending would have made her position worse, not better, and risked an urgent motion for an interim order forcing removal on short notice. Sana opened the gate and cleared the laneway within days of that advice, which also signalled good faith heading into settlement talks.
3. Pressed for documentation behind the damages claim. Giulia's lawyer was asked for receipts, fuel records, or any written basis for the $14,000 trucking figure and the $7,000 time-value figure. Only about $9,000 of the trucking costs could be substantiated with actual invoices; the rest was estimate. The $5,000 alternate-access figure was dropped from the discussion entirely once the laneway reopened, since no alternate route was ever going to be built.
4. Raised the unresolved maintenance question as part of the same conversation. Rather than litigating only the blockage, we proposed that the settlement also fix the underlying dispute that had caused it — a written cost-sharing arrangement for future grading and repairs, split according to each party's use of the laneway, to be registered as a notice on title so it would survive if either property changed hands.
5. Negotiated a settlement conference resolution before trial. Small Claims Court schedules a settlement conference before most matters reach a trial date, and it gave both sides a structured venue to trade the documented damages number against Sana's cooperation and the new maintenance agreement, without the cost and delay of a full hearing.

The outcome

The parties reached a consent resolution rather than proceeding to trial. Sana agreed to pay Giulia roughly $9,500 — close to the documented trucking costs, with a modest amount added to account for the months of blocked access, but well under the roughly $26,000 originally claimed. The unsupported time-value and alternate-access figures were dropped. Both women signed a written maintenance agreement covering the laneway going forward, splitting grading and repair costs on a defined basis, and that agreement was registered on title so it would bind future owners of either property, not just the two of them personally.

Neither side walked away with everything they wanted, which is the ordinary shape of a negotiated settlement rather than a clean win. Giulia recovered a meaningful part of her costs but not the full claim, and had to accept that some of what she asked for was never going to be provable. Sana avoided a trial, a larger damages award, and the legal costs that can come with losing outright, but she paid for having taken the law into her own hands rather than raising the maintenance dispute through the right channel from the start. The right of way itself was never seriously in doubt once the title was reviewed — the real dispute, underneath the gate and the hay bales, was always about who pays for gravel.

What you can learn from this