UNIFORM CANADIAN CONDOMINIUM ACT
CCI New Millennium Project ?

(As appeared in the CCI - National Review, Winter 1999, with minor edit updates)

At every National CCI Conference, the pace and current status of legislation-revision initiatives in several provinces has been a regular, and popular, topic. In the brief time allotted, lawyers from anchor sectors of the Institute's membership provided an overview of amendments proposed in their respective jurisdictions, attempted to identify their point in the drafting and approval path, and offer educated guesses as to when they might become law.

Of course, each synopsis included knowledgeable and insightful commentary regarding the rationale and/or need for particular updates. However, what's really concerning to this condominium commentator is that after more than 30 years of statutory condominium in Canada, there is still so little cross-jurisdictional consistency.

But, there's something even more disturbing. In Alberta, the saga of the Condominium Property Amendment Act was sufficiently long and contentious that differences between so-called "stakeholder groups" more than once received press play. The province was not alone in these conflicts.

Interestingly, most issues had little or nothing to do with the fundamental survey articulation of the ownership mosaic and the imposition of a classic corporate administrative framework — the first, and in jurisdictions with bare-bones legislation the only, statutory role. Investor-disclosure protections imposed upon developers is often the second sector of legislative content.

The source of most conflict resided with amendments that would alter established decision-making authorities, and impose upon condominium communities positive obligations that ordinary and special majorities, even community unanimity, could not avoid. These statutory directives ran the full financial, administrative, and property-maintenance gamut, including the requirement to employ professionals.

The heat of ideological debate was intense, as it was also in other provinces engaged in the revision process. Proponents of particular amendments invoked "public good" arguments for curatorial intervention while opponents championed "private property" rights. All sides petitioned legislators to accept theirs as the leading-edge counsel with respect to the proper direction of condominium. Surely, from all these, an optimal assemblage would prevail, and the final results would be mirrored in the amendment processes of other provinces.

Not necessarily so! Even a cursory examination of various Amendment Acts (some have since become law) reveals dramatic differences in political philosophy. For example, not only does the province with the largest proportion of condominium-title homes reject imposition of mandatory reserve fund studies, but British Columbia has even decided to shun the clarity and consistency of continent-wide nomenclature and return to the semantic confusion of "strata property". In a dramatic alteration to investment fundamentals, only Alberta feels that it's in the public interest to permit a special majority of owners to change originally-contracted contribution proportions. Ontario's new Condominium Act changes completely the off-quoted unit-plus-common-property definition of condominium by including a unit-less Common Element Condominium.

Condominium is obviously changing constantly, and certainly not consistently!  What is (or will be) condominium in the new millennium?

Classic definitions state that it is a title system whereby complete ownership of land and air-space defined by either a master land lot (including the structures it may or may not contain), or portions of volumetric air space within a building, is divided into titles comprising 1) private, exclusive portions (the units) and 2) a proportionate tenancy-in-common share in the residual common property.

Owners of these titles are, members of a corporation (called a syndicat in Quebec) which is charged with maintaining and conserving the common property and with administering the co-ownership relationship. Survey plans and a combination of constitutional declarations and by-laws constitute the hierarchical cement for the shared-ownership arrangement.

In its purest sense, there is little about statutory condominium as described above that is not an extension of, and supported by, established legal ownership concepts, survey techniques, organizational theory, and private-contract procedures. However, how condominium in Canada will continue to evolve is not clear.

In the United States two decades ago, the ideal of a uniform statute — one which represented the distilled wisdom of the day — resulted in development of a Uniform Condominium Act, which was approved and recommended by the National Conference of Uniform Law Commissioners in 1980. While acceptance in whole, or incorporation in part, into law is still the right of each state, benefits of the process were real and welcomed.

Therefore, since the Canadian Condominium Institute is the only multi-disciplinary cross-jurisdictional body whose professional membership is involved on a daily basis with current and proposed legislation, and since objects "F" and "G" of the CCI Letters Patent exhort its membership to:

Provide Guidance to Various Levels of Government with Regard to Condominium Policies and Legislation; and

Provide a Forum for the Exchange of Ideas about Condominium and for the Discussion of Problems Related to Condominium;

it is hereby proposed that the Institute, as its New Millennium Project, act as touchstone and clearinghouse for a similar initiative; and

that a discussion forum become a regular component at National Conferences.