Ontario Construction News staff writer
Today, Ontario Construction News launches some new tools and resources to enhance and speed up the publication of Certificates of Substantial Performance (CSP) and other notices mandated by the Ontario Construction Act.
These include a provision to publish a live, downloadable copy of the relevant certificates, and a system that automates the posting/publishing of the relevant notices, shaving some hours off the production process before the notices can be published.
The visible aspect of this change is that you can, if you wish, self-enter the relevant form data and (if you wish) pay on the spot by credit card through PayPal.
The do-it-yourself tool may be helpful in situations where you wish to post your notice shortly before the 5:00 p.m. deadline the business day before publication.
But it is quite okay (and probably makes sense in most cases) for you to continue to send us the notices the old-fashioned way – as an email attachment to certificates@ontarioconstructionnews.com (the best way) or by fax to 1-613-702-5357.
While you won’t see obvious changes, the new systems allow us to remove some duplicate and production processes, speeding our turn-around time for proofs and enabling us to maintain the shortest legally-compliant CSP notice publishing cycle in Ontario.
While the Ontario Construction Act allows the legally-defined daily Construction Trade Newspaper to be published in electronic format, a separate law, the Legislation Act (2006) defines “newspaper” as needing to be in “sheet format” and published at regular intervals. This means, in our interpretation, that the notices need to be published daily in a PDF publication, as well as through a retrievable database.
While this means we cannot publish the notices instantly, the delay can be as little as a few hours. We’ll send you proof of publication certificate in less than a day for certificates sent to us Monday through Thursday.
The price for this service remains highly competitive at $249.00 per notice, regardless of length, meaning you could achieve savings of $90 to $250 or more, depending on your notice’s length.
While we have introduced a prepayment option, you can still pay by cheque, direct bank deposit, or credit card after the notice is published and you receive your Certificate of Publication.
And you of course can save the time and effort of keying in the data – which can be a significant advantage if you have several notices you wish to publish in Ontario Construction News.
But, as noted above, it is quite okay to do things like you’ve always done, by sending your certificates to certificates@ontarioconstructionnews.com.
Meanwhile, although the Ontario Construction Act doesn’t require publishers to post the actual live copy of your CSP or other legal form, we think this is a good idea because it certainly absolutely proves the notice has been properly published. (If this sort of copy requirement was truly required by law then none of the notices published under the former Construction Lien Act over the past decades would have been legal, because the Ontario Construction Act’s regulations largely mirror the wording in the former CLA.)
While we presently don’t plan to post these copies retroactively, we will publish the actual CSP document submitted to us going forward and will add the earlier request to the database upon request.
You can check out the new direct entry system at www.ontarioconstructionnews.com/forms.
You’ll be able to retrieve the relevant documents simply by using our search function for the relevant certificates.