Cancellations, discharges and releases

The one who wants to know the story of an immovable property in Quebec can follow the events by consulting the land register of the registration division in which is located such immovable property.

Sellers and purchasers, heirs and creditors, all of them, in order to make known the existence of their rights and make them opposable against third parties, will have to make sure to publish the relevant deeds in the land register. This task is often devolved to the notaries, but several types of deeds do not necessarily require the intervention of the latter.

Several of these rights are charges which encumber an immovable property and are obstacles to its free circulation in the market. The conventional immovable hypothec (also known as mortgage), the legal hypothec of the syndicate of co-owners, the legal hypothec of the persons who participated in the construction or the renovation of a property ("the legal hypothec of construction"), a balance of sale price secured by hypothec, a declaration of family residence, the legal hypothec of the State resulting from fiscal debts, the prior notices of the exercise of hypothecary remedies, are rights which, frequently, will affect an immovable property following their publication in the land register.

These rights are not intended to affect an immovable property in a permanent way, the owners of such immovable property will want one day to sell it or refinance it. Whether the owner is an individual who die or else a business corporation which will be sold, dissolved, will merge or goes bankrupt, in all the cases, the owners and the creditors will want a clear title of ownership, in other words, a title free of rights.

The legal mechanism which normally leads to the suppression of these rights in the land register is the cancellation. It is through a cancellation that the registrar will indicate that the right originally published no longer produces legal effects. Thus, the hypothecary creditor (also known as mortgage creditor) who agrees to the signature of a cancellation and to its publication in the land register comes to assert that he holds no more rights on the immovable property hypothecated.