Condominium Industry Update – CMRAO Complaints & The Digital Dispute Resolution Process at the CAT

I recently attended a continuing professional development course put on by the Law Society of Ontario on various condominium legal issues. There were presenters from various law firms across the province, as well as representatives from the Condominium Authority of Ontario (CAO) and the Condominium Management Regulatory Authority of Ontario (CMRAO). The representatives from the CAO and CMRAO provided some interesting information on the industry that I thought I would share with our readers.

CMRAO

According to the representative from the CMRAO, there are over 13,000 condominium corporations in Ontario with 10,700 managed by licensed management providers and 2,400 self-managed. (Note: I asked if the 13,000 included condominiums that had been terminated or amalgamated, but I did not get an answer so we must wait to figure that out another day). There are 5,010 licensed managers in Ontario with 2,762 general licensees and 2,248 limited licensees working for 416 licensed management services providers.

The representative also discussed complaints made to the CMRAO. The number of complaints ranged from 720 to 983 each year with 2023-2024 seeing the largest number of complaints (983). For complaints from unit owners or residents most related to allegations of unprofessional conduct, not accommodating owners or residents, or repair related issues. For complaints from boards, the complaints were focused more on allegations that the manager was not fulfilling the contract, not keeping adequate records, not transferring records upon termination of the contract, and financial mismanagement.

More than 90% of the complaints received were from owners or residents with 75% closed after review indicated a lack of merit or jurisdiction and only 25% required some type of mediation, warning, or other action. Complaints from boards represented less than 5% of the complaints received. Of these complaints, 35% resulted in a warning or reminder of professional obligations and 15% resulted in referral to the discipline committee, licence suspension or revocation.  

CAO

Two familiar faces from the CAO (Marc Bhalla and Michael Clifton) spoke about the role of the CAO and the Condominium Authority Tribunal (CAT). They reported that the most common issues viewed on the CAO’s website were records, noise, condo managers, pets, vibration, and parking & storage. This is not surprising given the reported decisions often involve these issues, but I was surprised that smoke and harassment were not higher on the list.

There were also several interesting decisions in their materials related to requests for accommodation from parties during the CAT process. For example, owners would provide a doctor’s note saying they could not attend an in-person process so they could not participate in the CAT process. The problem with this argument is that the CAT does not require the parties to attend in-person with most of the process being done in written format at times that are convenient for the parties (like emails) so long as they meet the deadlines set for responses by the mediator or adjudicator. In one case, an owner used a computer at work between the hours of 1 am and 5 am to post messages and the manager (who worked more traditional hours) would respond later that day. In another interesting decision the owner did not have a computer so the manager printed the messages from the CAT system and delivered them to the owner for her to respond to. Their anecdotes illustrated how flexible the CAT system is compared to other courts and tribunals.  

There were other great presentations as well, but these were the two that contained content that seemed to be of the most interest to our readers. Also, many of the presenters were from law firms with condominium law blogs so I’m sure you’ll find some content from them shortly on their own blogs.