Ontario Building Code Article 1.2.2.2 requires the designer to carry out general reviews of the construction and to determine whether, in the designer's professional opinion, the work is in general conformity with the documents that formed the basis for the permit. The clause states the obligation. It does not prescribe the form of the document that records it. That document, the field review report, is where the obligation either holds up or does not.
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 goes inside the report itself. The clause asks the designer to form and record a professional opinion on conformity. A report that does that defensibly carries a consistent set of elements, and most thin reports are thin because one of those elements is missing or collapsed into another.
What the clause actually asks a report to prove
The clause asks for two things that are easy to conflate: a general review, and an opinion on general conformity. Neither is an inspection. General review is the periodic, professional-judgment review of construction against the permit documents that the designer prepared. It is not an exhaustive, continuous, or guaranteeing examination of every element of the work. The report has to make that scope visible, because a report that reads as if it certified everything claims more than the clause asks for and more than the engineer can defend.
So the report is not a checklist of pass or fail. It is the durable record of a professional opinion: who reviewed the work, on what date, over what portion of it, what they observed, whether that observation is in general conformity with the design and the applicable code, against what reference that judgment is measured, and the engineer's sealed assumption of responsibility for the opinion. Strip any one of those out and the report still looks like a report. It just stops being defensible when it is examined years later.
The six elements every defensible entry carries
A defensible field review entry carries six elements. The list is discipline-neutral; what fills each element changes by discipline, but the structure does not.
- Scope identification. What was reviewed, on what date, for what portion of the work.
- Observation. What the engineer directly observed at the time of the review.
- Finding. Whether the observation is in general conformity with the design documents and the applicable codes or standards.
- Reference. The design document or code clause the finding is measured against.
- Recommendation. What, if anything, the engineer requires to bring the work into conformity.
- Signature and seal. The engineer's assumption of responsibility under Regulation 941, section 53.
The rest of this piece takes the elements that fail most often and shows what thin looks like against what defensible looks like.
Scope is the element most often left implicit
Scope is the element engineers most often carry in their heads instead of on the page. A report dated and titled "site review" with no statement of what portion of the work was reviewed reads, after the fact, as a review of everything visible that day. That is rarely what happened, and it is never what the engineer intended to assume responsibility for.
A defensible scope statement has boundaries. It names the date, the location, and the specific portion of the work: the eighth-floor slab pour, the second-floor demising wall framing, the main electrical room terminations. It also makes clear, where it matters, what was not reviewed. "Reinforcement and formwork for the eighth-floor slab were reviewed prior to the pour; the seventh-floor slab was not part of this review" is a sentence that closes a gap a contractor or a plaintiff would otherwise open. Silence on scope is the most common defensibility gap in field review reporting, and it is the cheapest one to close.
Observation and finding are not the same sentence
The second recurring failure is collapsing observation and finding into a single judgment. "The rebar was fine" is a finding with no observation behind it. It records a conclusion but not the fact the conclusion rests on, and it cannot be tested later.
Observation is what the engineer saw, measured, or read: bar spacing matched the placement drawing, cover was confirmed at the southeast corner, a pressure test held at the specified value, a panel schedule matched the issued drawing. Finding is the professional opinion that the observation supports: the work reviewed is in general conformity with the design, or it is not. Keeping the two in separate clauses is not a style preference. It is what lets a reader, later, see both the evidence and the judgment and confirm that the second follows from the first. When the observation is visual, a photograph belongs with it. When the observation is instrumental, the reading belongs with it.
Reference is what turns an opinion into a defensible one
A finding of general conformity is conformity with something. The reference names that something. Without it, "in general conformity" is an assertion floating free of any standard, and the engineer is the only authority for it.
There are two kinds of reference, and good entries cite the right one. The design document is the authority on what this particular project required: the structural drawing, the reviewed shop drawing, the mechanical schedule. The code or material standard is the authority on the minimum the work has to meet regardless of the design: the CSA standard for the discipline, the applicable code clause. A finding that the work conforms to the design answers a different question than a finding that the work meets the code, and a defensible entry is clear about which it is asserting. Generic borrowing of a reference from another discipline's template, citing a concrete standard in a mechanical review, is the kind of durability gap that surfaces precisely when the report is examined.
A deficiency entry has to close the loop or flag it open
When a review finds non-conformity, the report carries more weight, not less. A deficiency entry has to do three things: classify the non-conformity, state what is required to correct it, and leave a record of whether it was resolved.
Classification is the difference between a deficiency requiring corrective action, an item noted for follow-up, and an observation merely recorded. The recommendation states what the engineer requires from the contractor or owner. The part most often dropped is the third: the resolution. A report that records a deficiency and never records its correction leaves an open question in the file forever. Either the later review confirms the correction and the report says so, or the item remains open and the report says that instead. A defensible report never leaves a deficiency in an indeterminate state by silence.
The seal is a scope statement, not a formality
The signature and seal are where the engineer assumes responsibility for the report under Regulation 941, section 53, which in its current form requires a practitioner to sign and seal an engineering document where the practitioner prepared the engineering content or otherwise took responsibility for it. The seal is not decoration on a finished document. It is the act that binds the named scope to a named professional.
Because it is a scope statement, the seal cannot reach further than the scope the report identifies. A mechanical engineer's seal on a field review covers the mechanical work that engineer reviewed. It does not extend to structural or electrical work that appears in the same building, even if the report sits in a consolidated file on someone else's letterhead. This is the same logic the general review clause runs on: responsibility follows the design, and the seal follows responsibility. A report whose scope statement and seal agree is one an engineer can stand behind without qualification.
Why the skeleton matters at volume
A firm doing field review at any scale is not writing one of these reports. It is writing many, across projects, sites, and reviewers, over years. The six-element skeleton is what keeps them consistent: it is the difference between a body of reports that all hold the same standard and a drawer of documents whose defensibility depends on who happened to write each one and how rushed they were that afternoon.
None of this is new to firms that operate at the standard the clause contemplates. The anatomy of a defensible sealed review is well understood in mature practices, and a firm building a field review template from scratch can adopt the same structure on day one, because the structure is discipline-neutral. The clause asks for a general review and a recorded opinion on general conformity. The report that proves both is the one that carries all six elements, every time, without depending on the reviewer to remember them under field conditions.
