Slip and Falls on Calgary Sidewalks and Parking Lots: Your Rights

Every Calgary winter sends a steady stream of people to the Foothills, Rockyview, and Peter Lougheed emergency rooms with broken wrists, fractured hips, and concussions from falls on ice. Most assume a fall is simply bad luck. Legally, many falls are something else: a property owner's failure to do what Alberta law requires.

Who owes you safety, and where

Alberta's Occupiers' Liability Act puts responsibility on whoever controls the property: the store behind the parking lot, the landlord of the building, the condo corporation, and frequently the winter-maintenance contractor they hired. On public sidewalks, Calgary bylaws require adjacent property owners to clear ice and snow, and the City itself has responsibilities for roads and some walkways. When you fall, several parties may share the blame, and they will all point at each other.

The evidence window is brutally short

The hazard that dropped you will be sanded, scraped, or melted within hours. If you can, photograph the exact spot immediately, wide shots for location, close-ups of the ice, and your footwear. Report the fall to the business or building the same day so an incident report exists, and get contact details for anyone who saw you go down or helped you up. If the fall involved snow or ice on city property, written notice to the municipality can be required within weeks, miss it and the claim may be gone regardless of how strong it was.

"You should have watched your step"

Expect the insurer to argue you were careless, wrong footwear, walking too fast, looking at your phone. Sometimes that produces shared fault, which reduces rather than eliminates compensation. But maintenance and inspection logs frequently tell the real story: hazards reported and ignored, contracts requiring sanding that never happened, inspection schedules that existed only on paper. Those records are obtainable, and they win cases.

Falls are not minor claims

Hip fractures in older adults, wrist fractures that never regain strength, and head injuries from falls are among the most serious injuries we see, with real surgical costs, income loss, and lasting impairment. If a fall on someone's property injured you, find out what your claim is actually worth before the insurer tells you what they'd like it to be. The review is free, and you pay nothing unless we win.