What Assets Can Be Seized After a Lawsuit in Canada?

After a Canadian judgment, a creditor can reach most of what you own: home equity above an exemption that is often just $9,000 to $40,000 depending on the province, every dollar in your TFSA and non-registered accounts, second properties, and vehicles above a modest threshold. The genuinely protected list is short — RRSPs (mostly), registered pensions, basic household goods, and the tools of your trade up to set limits — and every one of those protections comes with provincial fine print.

If you're reading this because a claim has already landed, the map below tells you what's exposed. If you're reading it before anything has happened, it tells you something more useful: exactly what an underinsured judgment would be collected from.

How seizure actually works, in one paragraph#

A plaintiff who wins more than your insurance pays doesn't get your assets automatically. They register the judgment, then use provincial enforcement tools: a writ against your land, seizure and sale of personal property through the sheriff or civil enforcement agency, garnishment of accounts and wages, and a debtor examination where you must disclose everything you own under oath. The step-by-step machinery — and how long it can run — is a story we tell separately. This page is about the target list.

The map: what's reachable and what isn't#

Exemptions are set province by province, so treat every row as "in most provinces" — the pattern holds across Canada even where the dollar figures differ:

Read the protected column carefully and a pattern emerges: Canadian law protects subsistence — a place at the table, a way to earn, retirement money already locked away. It does not protect prosperity. Everything you've built beyond the basics is, in principle, collectable.

The house is its own question#

Home equity deserves — and gets — its own full treatment on this site, because it's the asset most families care about and the one judgment creditors like best: it's visible on title, it can't be moved, and a registered writ quietly blocks every sale and refinance until the debt is addressed. The one-line version: in most provinces, only a small slice of your equity is exempt, and the rest is reachable. If your equity is measured in hundreds of thousands, the exemption is a rounding error.

Why "protected" is doing less work than you hope#

Three cautions before you take comfort in the protected column:

1. Protection varies by province — sometimes a lot. An asset that's sheltered in Alberta may be exposed in Ontario. If you move provinces, your protection map changes with you.
2. Timing can defeat protection. RRSP contributions made after trouble is on the horizon can be reversed. Courts look hard at money that moved toward shelter after a claim arose.
3. You can't outrun a claim by gifting assets. Transferring the cottage to your spouse or the savings to your kids once you've been sued (or expect to be) is a fraudulent conveyance in the making — courts can unwind it, and the attempt damages your credibility in the underlying case.

That last point matters most. Real asset protection is legal structure built years in advance — and even then, courts are unsympathetic to structures whose only purpose is defeating injury victims. For an ordinary household, the practical protection isn't hiding assets. It's making sure the judgment gets paid by an insurer instead.

The comparison nobody runs#

Put the two strategies side by side. Restructuring your affairs to shield assets: complicated, expensive, province-dependent, reversible by a court, and useless if done late. An umbrella liability policy: roughly $200–$300 per year for $1 million of coverage above your existing policies, and about $50–$75 per year for each additional million — estimates based on typical Canadian broker pricing, not quotes.

The umbrella doesn't just pay a judgment that would otherwise land on your TFSA and your home equity. It changes the fight itself: a plaintiff facing adequate coverage settles with the insurer and never starts hunting your assets at all. The seizure map above only ever gets used against people whose coverage ran out.

Know what's exposed. Then make the list irrelevant.