Two activities on an Ontario construction project share enough surface vocabulary that they are routinely treated as the same thing. One is the general review the designer carries out under the Ontario Building Code. The other is the building inspection the municipality's building official carries out under the Building Code Act. They overlap in time, they both touch the same construction, and they both ask, in some sense, whether the work is right. That is where the resemblance ends.
A companion piece establishes that Article 1.2.2.2 binds every discipline whose design required a sealed permit drawing, not only structural. This piece resolves a different confusion. The general review and the building inspection are complementary functions performed by different actors under different authorities, and a firm that conflates them either assumes responsibility it did not intend to or skips an obligation it cannot delegate. The distinction is not academic. It determines who is on the hook when a question is asked years later.
The two activities, defined
General review is the designer's obligation under OBC Article 1.2.2.2, in Division C, Part 1 of the Ontario Building Code. The designer, the Professional Engineer or Ontario-licensed architect who prepared and sealed the design for a part of the work, carries out periodic reviews of the construction and determines whether, in their professional opinion, the work is in general conformity with the plans and other documents that formed the basis for the permit. The word general is doing work in both halves of the phrase. The review is general because it is periodic and exercised through professional judgment, not exhaustive or continuous. The conformity is general because the designer forms an opinion on the work as a whole against the design, not a guarantee on every element.
Building inspection is something else entirely. It is conducted by the municipality's building official, under the direction of the chief building official, under the Building Code Act, 1992. The Building Code Act is the enabling statute; the Ontario Building Code is the regulation made under that Act. The building official inspects construction at mandated stages, enforces the Code, and holds the authority connected to permit issuance and to authorising construction to proceed and the building to be occupied. The inspection is an exercise of public authority. The general review is the discharge of a private professional obligation. They are not two names for one thing.
Who performs each, and under what authority
The cleanest way to keep the two apart is to ask, in any given moment, who is acting and under what authority they act.
The designer is a private professional engaged on the project. The firm was retained, sealed the permit drawings for its part of the work, and is bound to general-review that work because Article 1.2.2.2 attaches the field obligation to the design. The authority is the Building Code, and the responsibility runs to the public through the standard the Code sets and through the seal the practitioner applied. Regulation 941, section 53, rewritten by O. Reg. 837/21 and in force in its current form since 2021, governs that seal: signing and sealing an engineering document is an assumption of professional responsibility for the engineering content. The seal lives on the designer's general-review report.
The building official is a public authority. The official is appointed by the municipality, derives power from the Building Code Act, and inspects to enforce the Code in the public interest. The official issues permits, conducts inspections at the stages the framework mandates, and grants or withholds authorisation to proceed and to occupy. No seal of the official's lives on the designer's report, and the designer's seal never appears on the official's inspection. The two records are produced by two different parties exercising two different kinds of authority, and they stay in separate files for exactly that reason.
Three asymmetries that keep the two apart
It helps to name the asymmetries directly, because the confusion in the field almost always collapses one of them.
The first is the actors. The designer is a private professional the owner engaged to design and then to review a part of the work. The building official is a public authority the municipality appoints to enforce the Code across all the work it regulates. A private party and a public party are not interchangeable, and neither can stand in for the other.
The second is the questions. The general review asks whether the construction is in general conformity with my design and the applicable Code. It is the designer testing the built work against the documents the designer prepared and sealed. The inspection asks a different question: may construction proceed or be occupied under this permit, and does the work comply with the Code. One is an opinion on conformity with a specific design held by the person who authored it. The other is a determination, by the enforcing authority, about whether the project may advance under its permit. Different questions produce different records, and a record that answers one does not answer the other.
The third, and the one that costs firms money, is that neither activity discharges the other. A building official's inspection does not relieve the designer of the general-review obligation. The designer still owes the periodic review and the recorded professional opinion, regardless of how many times an inspector attended the site. Equally, the designer's general review does not replace the statutory inspection. The owner and the contractor still need the official's inspections at the mandated stages and the official's authorisation to proceed. The misconception cuts both ways. The city inspected it, so we do not need to is wrong, and our engineer reviewed it, so the city does not need to is equally wrong. Both obligations exist; both have to be met.
Where the terminology blurs, and how to keep it straight
Part of the confusion is genuinely a vocabulary problem. The field uses general review, field review, site review, and inspection loosely, often in the same conversation, and the words drift across the line that the regulatory framework draws sharply.
General review and field review are effectively the same designer-side activity. Article 1.2.2.2 uses general review; the report the designer produces is commonly called a field review report; site review is the same activity again under a third label. None of these is the building official's function, even though field review can sound, to an untrained ear, like the same thing a field inspector does. They are the designer reviewing the designer's own work against the design and the Code. The field review report is the artefact that records that obligation, and it carries the designer's seal.
Inspection, in the regulatory sense, is the building official's function and only the building official's function. When the framework speaks of inspection connected to permits, mandated stages, and authorisation to occupy, it means the public official's act, not anything the designer does. The practical rule is simple: if the activity is the designer testing the designer's sealed work and producing a sealed report, it is general review under whatever name it travels under locally. If the activity is the municipality's official enforcing the Code and authorising the project to advance, it is inspection. Keeping the labels disciplined inside a firm prevents the substantive confusion from taking root.
Why conflating them creates real exposure
The reason this matters beyond pedantry is that the two functions carry different liabilities, and collapsing them moves responsibility to the wrong party in a way that surfaces only when something goes wrong.
A firm that treats the building official's inspection as a substitute for its own general review has left the general-review obligation unmet while believing it covered. The official's attendance does not produce the designer's professional opinion on conformity with the designer's design, and it does not carry the designer's seal. When the work is later questioned, the file shows inspections the firm did not perform and lacks the general review the firm owed. The seal that should sit on a general-review report has nothing to sit on. That is exposure created entirely by a category error.
The reverse error is just as costly. A party that treats the designer's general review as a replacement for the statutory inspection proceeds without the authorisation only the building official can grant. The general review, however thorough, does not authorise construction to advance or a building to be occupied, and assuming it does invites stop-work and occupancy problems it was never empowered to prevent. In both directions, the cost is the same: a function that one party owed went unperformed because someone assumed the other party's function covered it.
What this means for a firm's documentation
For a firm doing sealed engineering work, the discipline is mostly documentary. The general review produces a sealed field review report that records the designer's professional opinion on general conformity, scoped to the work the firm designed. That report is the firm's artefact, it carries the firm's seal under Regulation 941, section 53, and it is the record the firm stands behind. The building official's inspection produces the official's own record, in the official's file, under the official's authority. The firm neither owns nor relies on that record to discharge its own obligation.
The practical posture follows from that separation. Keep the general-review file complete on its own terms, as though the inspections did not exist, because for the purpose of the designer's obligation they do not relieve anything. Do not cite the building official's inspection as evidence the general review was performed; it is evidence of a different thing done by a different party. And where a specific project's requirements are unclear, confirm them with the municipality's building services department rather than inferring them, because mandated inspection stages and local permit conditions vary and the firm's obligation is best read against the actual requirements rather than a general assumption.
Held to that standard, the two functions stop competing for the same mental slot. The general review is the firm's, sealed and documented as the firm's professional opinion on its own design. The inspection is the official's, exercised as public authority over the project. They run in parallel, they reinforce each other, and they leave the firm exposed only when it forgets which one it is responsible for.
