Elevator down again? How to check a Toronto building's elevator record before winter

Every high-rise has an elevator story. The one that's "being serviced" for a month. The two-car building running on one car through a heat wave. The 41-storey tower on Dan Leckie Way where a frozen sprinkler line flooded the shafts and repairs took weeks.

Fall is when this starts to matter more: ice, heating season, and short days make the stairs a worse fallback, and if you signed a September lease you haven't seen your building's elevators under stress yet. The good news: elevator reliability leaves a paper trail, and most of it is public.

The three records to pull

1. TSSA's outage log

Since July 1, 2022, the owner of any elevator in a residential building in Ontario must report every outage of 48 hours or longer to the Technical Standards and Safety Authority, within 30 days of the car returning to service. The report has to include the start and end time, the cause, what prolonged it, the maintenance interval, and the contractor's name.

Those reports go into the TSSA's Residential Elevator Availability Portal (ea.tssa.org), and anyone can search it by address. The province has almost 20,000 passenger elevators across more than 10,000 buildings, but for one address it's a quick read.

What to look for: not one long outage, but a pattern — the same car, several times a year, with "awaiting parts" as the cause. That's an ageing elevator without a modernization plan. A single 5-day outage after a flood is bad luck; a fourth one is a budget decision.

Two caveats. Outages under 48 hours never appear, so a lift that dies for a day every week looks perfect. And reporting is self-reported by owners — missing entries are themselves a signal.

2. RentSafeTO's two elevator lines

If the building is a registered rental with 3+ storeys or 10+ units, the City inspects it and scores roughly 50 categories from 0 to 3. Two of them are about elevators, and they mean different things:

• Elevator maintenance — is the car working, licensed, and being maintained on a schedule? This is the one that predicts outages.
• Elevator cosmetics — scuffed walls, dead indicator lights, a stained floor. Ugly, but it doesn't mean the car will strand you.

A worked example: 200 Wellesley St E, a 719-unit, 29-storey tower from 1970, scored 82/100 on its November 2025 evaluation. Its elevator maintenance line is 3/3 while elevator cosmetics is 2/3 — the cars are tired-looking but kept up. That's the combination you'd rather have than the reverse. (Data via PropertyMonitorTO, from the City's Apartment Building Evaluation dataset.)

Also glance at the tenant notification board and vital service plan lines. The City's apartment-building bylaw requires owners to post service disruptions on that board; a low score there usually means you'll find out the elevator is down when you're standing in front of it.

RentSafeTO doesn't cover condos or buildings under 10 units. For those, the TSSA log and City orders are what you've got.

3. Orders and investigations

An elevator complaint to 311 becomes a bylaw investigation; if an inspector finds a property-standards violation, it becomes an Order to Comply with a deadline. The public record rarely says "elevator" in the description, so read the cluster, not the label: a building with several open property-standards investigations and a weak maintenance score is telling you something. See what an open order means for how to read them.

If you're already stuck on the 22nd floor

• Report it in writing to the landlord or management, with the date. Working elevators are part of the maintenance standard under the Residential Tenancies Act.
• Call 311 for an outage that drags on. That creates the investigation record — the one the next tenant will see.
• For a long or repeated outage, tenants can file a T6 maintenance application at the Landlord and Tenant Board and ask for a rent abatement. Keep a log of dates and any costs (delivery fees, missed shifts).
• If the building has one elevator, say so in your complaint — it's an accessibility issue, not an inconvenience.

Check it before the first snow

Search the address on the Building report card and read the two elevator lines separately. Pull the orders and investigations records for what's open now. Then search the same address on the TSSA portal for the outage history. Ten minutes, three sources — and a much better idea of whether "being serviced" means a week or a season.

Turn on monitoring and a new order or investigation on the building lands in your inbox, so you're not learning about the elevator from a sign taped to its door.