In Pinchin v. Ikemoto, 2026 ONSC 3786, an island property reachable only by boat depended on parking and launching from the mainland next door. The right to do so traced back to a 1952 deed that granted ingress and egress but failed to identify which part of the servient lot it burdened. The Superior Court upheld the easement on three independent grounds. For solicitors who draft and search titles, the decision is a compact tour of how easements are created, described, and preserved.
The Problem with the Grant
The 1952 deed granted the purchasers ingress and egress over Lot 27, and added that the grant could be conveyed to future successors. The trouble was the description. The grantor owned only part of Lot 27, and the deed said so by using the word “part,” yet it never identified which part. A defendant later argued that an easement over an unspecified part of a lot is not registrable and therefore cannot take effect, since an easement cannot exist in gross and the servient tenement must be identifiable.
The court disagreed. Where an express grant is unclear, a court may look at the circumstances at the time of the grant to determine the parties’ intention, drawing on the classic authority in Laurie v. Winch. The island could only be reached by crossing the grantor’s mainland land, and the only practicable crossing was the east bank of the creek. No other reading made commercial sense. The word “part” had been interlineated, suggesting the drafter knew the grantor did not own the whole lot but simply omitted the specific description. Treating that omission as fatal would render the word meaningless.
Licence or Interest in Land?
The defendant also argued that the grant was a mere licence, a personal permission that does not run with the land. The court rejected this because the deed expressly allowed the holder to convey the right to successors and assigns. A licence cannot be assigned in that way. By making the right transferable, the grantor created an interest in land.
Two Backstops: Necessity and Prescription
The decision does not rest on the express grant alone. The court found that an easement of necessity also arose. When a vendor sells land that is inaccessible except over retained land, the law implies a grant. The test is strict necessity, not mere convenience. Here, no public launch served the lake, and the unreliable ability to steer a small boat under a bridge, subject to water levels and beaver dams, fell short of a genuine alternative.
A prescriptive easement provided a third route, through the doctrine of lost modern grant. Decades of open, continuous, and unpermitted seasonal use, judged against the modest intensity expected for a vacant island, satisfied the twenty-year requirement. The court noted that lost modern grant does not require the twenty-year period to run immediately before the action, and that a matured prescriptive right survives later non-use absent abandonment.
The Registry Act and the 2010 Conversion
The most useful portion for conveyancers concerns preservation. The defendant argued the express easement expired under the forty-year notice regime in the Registry Act, since no notice of claim was registered within forty years of the 1952 deed. The court accepted that 2006 amendments retroactively eliminated the older preservation mechanism recognized in the Ramsay line of cases, a point later confirmed in Gold v. Chronas.
Yet the easement survived on each basis. The implied easement of necessity arises by operation of law, not from any registered instrument, so the expiry regime simply did not reach it. The same was true of the prescriptive easement. As for the express easement, the court turned to the good-faith purchaser requirement. An expired claim is extinguished only against a purchaser in good faith for value. Here the servient owner’s own deed took title subject to rights of way in favor of unidentified parties, which put her on inquiry, and a later transfer was a below-market intra-family conveyance with no evidence of any title inquiry. The court did not need to resolve the good-faith question definitively, because necessity and prescription were each independently sufficient.
Ancillary Rights: Parking Yes, Docking No
Ancillary rights flow only from what is reasonably necessary to enjoy the easement, not from what is merely convenient. Parking and launching a boat or canoe were necessary and were granted. Dock access was refused. The family had always dragged boats to the water or launched from a trailer, so extending the right to docks would overburden the servient land.
Practice Points
Describe the servient tenement precisely. The entire dispute grew from a deed that said Part without saying which part. A single omitted description spawned a multi-day trial seventy years later.
Read subject-to language as a search flag. A conveyance taken subject to rights in favor of those entitled thereto is an invitation to inquire. Ignoring it can defeat a later good-faith claim.
Implied and prescriptive rights bypass the notice regime. Rights arising by operation of law are not caught by the Registry Act expiry rules and can survive a conversion to Land Titles if matured beforehand.
