Someone moves in, pays rent, and the lease never gets signed. The tenancy exists anyway. What is missing is not the agreement, it is the record of what the two of you agreed to, and in most of Canada that record is a landlord obligation with a deadline attached to it.
The myth: no signature, no tenancy
The belief is that paperwork creates the tenancy. No signed lease, no lease at all, so the arrangement stays a private understanding you can end with a conversation. It turns up most where renting is personal: a basement suite, a house rented to a friend of a cousin, a unit where someone moved in on the Saturday and the forms were going to follow on the Monday.
The reality: possession and rent make a tenancy on their own
A tenancy agreement is a contract in which a tenant pays rent for the right to live in a unit, and it does not need a signature to exist. Ontario's Landlord and Tenant Board works from written and oral agreements alike, and where an oral agreement is unclear about who the tenant even is, the Board decides by looking at who entered into the arrangement with the landlord and who was entitled to occupy the unit (Interpretation Guideline 21). British Columbia puts it more bluntly: if a tenancy agreement is not in writing, the standard terms still apply.
The document does not bring the tenancy into being. It records the terms. When it is missing you do not get a blank slate, you get the statutory default plus an argument about everything you thought you had settled.
Ontario: the missing standard lease is worth a month of rent
For most private residential tenancies first entered into on or after April 30, 2018, the agreement has to be in writing, signed by both sides, on the government's standard lease form.
If you did not use it, the tenant holds a clock. They ask you in writing for the standard lease. You have 21 calendar days. Miss that and they can withhold one month of rent. If 30 calendar days go by after the withholding and the standard lease still has not arrived, they keep the money. Your exposure is capped at one month and rent resumes after it, so this is not open-ended. It is still a full month lost on a form that takes half an hour to complete.
The second cost lands later. A tenant in a fixed term normally cannot leave before the term ends. One of the exceptions is a tenancy entered into on or after April 30, 2018 where the landlord did not use the standard lease and the tenant sent a written demand for it (LTB brochure). The year you thought you had locked in becomes something the tenant can step out of on 60 days notice, ending on the last day of a rental period.
British Columbia: preparing the agreement is the landlord's job
BC requires the landlord to prepare a written agreement for every tenancy, signed and dated by both parties, with a copy to the tenant within 21 days of signing. Where nothing was written down, the standard terms of a tenancy agreement apply regardless. The paperwork gap changes what you can prove, not what you are bound by.
Alberta: a verbal lease is valid, and it is the one place rent can stop
Alberta allows an oral tenancy agreement outright, and the Residential Tenancies Act governs the tenancy either way. The problem is proof. An oral term is worth whatever you can establish about it later, in front of a hearing officer, against a tenant who remembers it differently.
If you do use a written lease, watch the return leg. The tenant signs and returns it, and you have 21 days to serve back a copy carrying your signature. Miss that and the tenant can withhold rent until you deliver it, which the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta notes is the only rent withholding the Act allows.
Quebec: the form has never been optional
Quebec goes furthest. The Tribunal administratif du logement lease form has been mandatory since September 1, 1996. If the lease was agreed verbally, you owe the tenant a document called Mandatory writing within ten days of the agreement. There is no version of a Quebec residential tenancy where the form is a nice-to-have.
What the gap costs you in a dispute
Rent payments prove the tenancy exists. The written agreement proves the terms, and four of them go missing first.
- The end date. A fixed term needs an agreed end date. Without one you have a periodic tenancy, and every plan that assumes the unit is free in June is a guess. Worth remembering that a fixed term ending is not a move-out date either.
- Utilities. Who pays heat, who pays hydro, and whether the split quietly changed in year two.
- What the rent includes. Parking, a locker, the second fridge, the shed. Anything you meant to charge for separately and never wrote down tends to end up included.
- Who the tenants are. Names on an agreement decide who holds the tenancy. Without them a board works it out from conduct, and the answer may not be the one you assumed.
Fix it this week
- List every unit where you could not produce a signed agreement within the hour. Inherited tenancies, family arrangements and long-running month-to-month units are where the gaps live.
- Complete your province's required form for each one and deliver it. In Ontario a standard lease you hand over on your own initiative costs nothing, while the same form after a written demand can cost you a month of rent.
- Write down the terms already in force, not the terms you wish were in force: the rent as it stands today, the deposit you hold, the utilities split, the parking arrangement.
- Do not treat the new document as a chance to raise the rent or add charges. An increase still runs through your province's notice rules and its own timing.
- Deliver it in a way you can evidence and keep the proof with the file. Every deadline in these rules runs from a date somebody has to be able to show.
The handshake was binding the day it happened. The written agreement is how you prove what you shook on, and outside an Alberta verbal tenancy, producing it is a landlord obligation with a clock on it rather than a favour you do when there is time.