Most complaints about door staff come from one gap: the public does not know what a guard may do, and a surprising number of guards are hazy on it too. Here is the line, drawn clearly.
This is general information for venue operators, not legal advice. Get your own counsel to review your post orders.
The starting point: a guard has no special powers
This surprises people. A licensed security guard in Ontario does not have police powers. What they have is the authority of the occupier — the venue — plus the same rights any member of the public has, exercised on the occupier's behalf. That is a narrower set of tools than most patrons assume and, occasionally, than the guard assumes.
Licensing under the Private Security and Investigative Services Act sets the training and background standard. It does not grant authority. A uniform is not a warrant.
Refusing entry
Allowed. A venue may refuse admission, and a guard may communicate that refusal. You do not need to give a reason, and the refusal does not have to be fair in the sense of being deserved.
Not allowed. Refusal on a ground protected by the Human Rights Code — race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status or disability. This is where door policy most often goes wrong, and where a complaint has real teeth.
Practically: log every refusal with a time and a reason. A refusal log that shows consistent, stated, non-discriminatory grounds is the best evidence a venue can have.
Asking someone to leave
Under Ontario's Trespass to Property Act, an occupier can withdraw permission to be on the premises at any time. Once that is communicated, the person must leave within a reasonable time. If they do not, they are trespassing.
The communication matters. "You need to leave now" said clearly to the person, ideally with a second officer present, is the moment the clock starts. Muttered, or shouted across a room, it is contestable later.
Reasonable force
A guard may use force that is reasonable in the circumstances to remove a trespasser. Every word there is doing work.
- Force is a last step, after the person has been asked and given the chance to go.
- It must be proportionate to the resistance, and no more.
- It stops the instant the person is compliant or outside. Force applied to someone who has stopped resisting is assault, and it is the single most common way a guard and a venue both end up in court.
- Strikes, chokes and anything applied to the neck are not removal techniques. There is no circumstance at a bar door where they are the reasonable option.
This is why de-escalation training is not a soft skill. It is the part of the job that keeps the other part from happening.
Detention and citizen's arrest
A guard may arrest someone found committing an indictable offence on the property, under the Criminal Code citizen's arrest provisions. In practice this is a narrow and risky power, and it comes with hard obligations: the person must be handed to police as soon as reasonably practicable, and the force used must be reasonable.
What a guard may not do: detain someone to "teach them a lesson", hold a person until they pay a bill, detain over a suspected but unwitnessed offence, or hold somebody simply because a manager wants them held. Unlawful detention is forcible confinement, and it does not stop being that because the person was being difficult.
Our standing rule is simple: if the situation calls for an arrest, it calls for police. Guards remove people, police arrest them.
Searches, ID and phones
- Searches require consent, and consent can be a condition of entry — "bags are searched at this door" is fine. What is not fine is searching someone who has refused, or continuing after consent is withdrawn.
- ID may be required as a condition of entry to a licensed premises, and a guard may examine it. A guard may not confiscate it. Suspected fraudulent ID is a police matter; seizing someone's driver's licence and keeping it is not lawful.
- Phones and filming. A patron filming in a public-facing venue is generally allowed to. A guard may not seize a phone, demand deletion, or use the filming as a reason to escalate. Assume everything is being recorded and behave accordingly — that is good practice regardless of the law.
The four things that actually get a venue sued
- Force that continued too long. Almost never the takedown; almost always the thirty seconds after it.
- An ejection that became a public humiliation. Walk people out, do not perform at them. The ones that go viral are the ones with an audience.
- A refusal with no stated reason and a protected-ground pattern. Even where each individual refusal was defensible, the pattern is the case.
- No written record. Eighteen months later, memory is worthless and the report is everything. A venue with a contemporaneous incident report is in a completely different position from one without.
The best-run doors in this city are boring. Nothing is performed, nobody is made an example of, and the paperwork exists.
Swarm Protective Services staffs licensed venues, events and protection details across the Greater Toronto Area. Dispatch is answered 24 hours on (416) 938-4766.
