The Trespass to Property Act of Ontario is a provincial law in Ontario, Canada dealing with illegal entry into private and public property. As a provincial law, the penalties and mechanisms of enforcement are also provincial. This is an important distinction; under the Canadian system, criminal law is within the realm of federal authority and anyone violating this statute would be subject to quasi-criminal (not full criminal) enforcement. The Act is an attempt to codify what was formerly recognized by the common law. It is most often used by private-property owners to keep unwanted individuals off their property. There are many methods of notifying unwanted individuals that they have been banned (for future access), but the most common is a personal notice to the offender.
Famous quotes containing the words trespass, property and/or act:
“No more be grieved at that which thou hast done,
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
My self corrupting salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are:”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“A lawyer’s dream of Heaven: Every man reclaimed his own property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“We all have—to put it as nicely as I can—our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with terrible power that sometimes destroys us; but they don’t talk.... Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before—truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)