Two things happen when Toronto’s forestry officers find a tree contravention on your property. First, the work that caused it stops. Second, the city decides what you owe: replacement trees, root zone repair, possibly a fine that runs to six figures per tree. The letter in your hand tells you which stage you’re at. It rarely tells you what happens next.
Two Orders, Two Different Clocks
A Stop Work Order halts whatever’s happening on site right now. It gets used when officers find an active problem: fencing down, equipment inside a root zone, a tree already cut. Nothing else on the property moves until it’s lifted.
An Order to Comply is the follow-up. It’s served personally or by registered mail, and if it goes by mail it’s deemed served on the third day after it’s sent, whether you opened it or not. The order sets a deadline for the corrective work and tells you what that work is: stop the activity, fix what you damaged, or both. You can get both orders at once. The Stop Work Order freezes the site; the Order to Comply tells you how to get it moving again.
Officers investigating can enter your property at reasonable times to inspect, take photos and samples, and request documents. Refusing access can lead to enforcement on its own, separate from whatever triggered the original visit.
What the City Can Demand
The remediation menu in an Order to Comply usually has three parts: reinstall or repair whatever tree protection is missing, restore the damaged root zone with soil and mulch, and remove anything encroaching on the tree protection zone.
Then there’s replanting. Current City practice for a tree removed without authorization is five replacement trees for every one you took down. In a ravine area, an injured tree calls for two replacements. A size-based pilot running since November 2022 can push that ratio up or down depending on the size of the removed tree, so five to one is a baseline, not a fixed number.
Replacement trees have to be kept in good condition for two years, to the city’s satisfaction, with dead ones replaced again, work done by or under an arborist. If planting all of them on site isn’t possible, the alternative is a cash payment equal to 120 percent of what it would cost to plant and maintain them for two years.
The Money
A conviction carries a fine of $500 to $100,000 per tree, and that’s per tree, not per incident. On top of that, the city can seek a special fine of up to $100,000. If you’re a corporate officer or director and you knowingly went along with the contravention, you can be held personally liable too.
Ignore the Order to Comply itself and that’s a separate offence, stacked on top of whatever the underlying contravention already cost you. And if you don’t do the corrective work by the deadline, the city can send in its own crew, do it, and bill you. Under the ravine bylaw specifically, unpaid costs can go straight onto your property tax roll.
There’s also a contravention inspection fee, charged per tree investigated and due within 90 days of the order, or added to your tax roll if it isn’t paid. Toronto hasn’t published a current dollar figure for it, so treat it as a real cost without a number attached until your case tells you what it is.
If your property backs onto a ravine, that bylaw adds a penalty the private-tree bylaw doesn’t have: a continuing offence there can run $500 to $10,000 per day. That per-day clock doesn’t apply outside ravine areas.
There’s no ticket you can just pay and move on from, either. Prosecution for a tree bylaw offence goes through the courts, not a set-fine system like a parking ticket. The city has floated adding one, but it’s a proposal under review for a future report, not something in place today.
What Actually Happens: Three Real Cases
The $100,000-per-tree number is a ceiling, and in practice the City rarely goes near it. What tends to happen instead is a negotiated remediation deal, unless the case ends up in provincial court.
In 2016, a developer clear-cut 40 mature trees, some over a century old and one linden roughly 150 years old, across two Bayview Ridge properties over a July long weekend. The city said no permit had ever been issued; the company disputed that. Rather than prosecute, city legal pursued an Order to Comply: just over $155,000 in remediation and 200 replacement trees, with deposits refunded per tree as each survived two years. It wasn’t a court fine. As reported by CBC, then-councillor Jaye Robinson called the outcome “a slap on the wrist.”
That same year, an Etobicoke homeowner cut 34 trees in the ravine-designated part of his own backyard over a long weekend. As reported by CBC, he was ordered to pay almost $6,000 in penalties and plant more than 100 replacement trees. Same city, same year, a fraction of the tree count, but the ravine designation shaped the outcome.
The one case that did go to court: an Oakville development company pleaded guilty in 2021 to clear-cutting hundreds of trees without a permit. Sentenced at Provincial Offences Court in Burlington, the company was fined $50,000, with the total reaching $62,000 once the victim fine surcharge was added, payable over a year, as a first offence and a joint submission.
There’s also an active one. As reported by CBC in 2025 and 2026, a Toronto multiplex developer is under city investigation for unpermitted tree removal at eight or more properties, including a roughly 80-centimetre honey locust cut after a removal application for it had been denied. The matter is before the courts, with no findings made yet.
What Changes on September 1, 2026
Council adopted a set of bylaw amendments that take effect September 1, 2026. None are in force yet, and none touch the $500 to $100,000 per tree fine range, which stays exactly where it is.
Replacement ratios move to a diameter-based system, in the city’s own words, “starting at 5:1 and increasing for larger trees.” No specific tiers by trunk size have been published yet.
If a tree is already gone by the time officers investigate, a stump 40 centimetres or wider, measured 30 centimetres above ground, becomes a valid way to establish what was removed, closing a gap where cutting a tree flush to the ground made it harder to prove what had been there.
Compensation and development-condition trees, the ones planted because a permit required it, become protected the moment they go in the ground, regardless of size. A new Distinctive Tree category also covers healthy private trees greater than 61 centimetres in diameter, expanding what counts as protected.
The Response Sequence That Actually Helps
Once a Stop Work Order or Order to Comply lands, the instinct is to fix the visible problem yourself, fast. Don’t. Touching anything else in the tree protection zone before you have a plan the city has seen makes things worse, and any protection barrier already up can’t be moved or altered without the general manager’s authorization.
Get an arborist on site to assess the damage and put together a remediation plan before you respond to the city. That plan needs to speak to the specific order you received: what protection gets reinstalled, how the root zone gets restored, and what the replanting obligation looks like given the tree’s size and location.
Then engage Urban Forestry directly, with that plan in hand. Our stop work order clearance service exists for exactly this sequence: emergency site assessment, a deficiency analysis against what the order requires, a remediation plan, and direct liaison with the city so you’re not guessing what they want.
If the original problem was inadequate tree protection fencing rather than actual root or trunk damage, the fix may be narrower than you fear, but you still need City sign-off before anything comes down. That close-out step is not optional (see when protection fencing can legally come down for the full process), and skipping it is its own separate contravention. Once remediation work is done, you’re the one who has to request the inspection that closes the file.
Getting the Order Closed Without a Second Contravention
An Order to Comply isn’t the end of your project, but treating it casually is how a single tree violation turns into a fine, a stacked second offence for ignoring the order, and a longer timeline than the original construction would have taken. The Toronto permit rules that governed the original tree are the same rules your remediation plan has to satisfy.
We handle Stop Work Order and Order to Comply responses for Toronto and GTA properties: prompt assessment, a remediation plan prepared for municipal review, and direct communication with Urban Forestry so you’re not relaying technical details back and forth yourself. Contact us with a copy of the order and your property address, and we can identify the documented deficiencies before the site visit.