The government has set two dates for changes to the Condominium Act that affect how owners’ meetings are called.
On December 31, 2026, a new set of rules for owners’ meetings comes into force. On July 1, 2027, the Condominium Authority Tribunal gets the power to hear disputes about how those meetings are called. The government filed the regulations on July 20, so these are no longer proposals.
Responding to a Requisition
The first change is the one boards need to be most careful with. When owners requisition a meeting, the board has to respond in writing, and the new rules give it 20 days. If the board does not respond, the Act now treats it as though the board had agreed to call the meeting. Ignoring a requisition, or waiting to see whether it goes away, now produces the same result as agreeing to call the meeting. And once the board has agreed, or is deemed to have agreed, the meeting has to be held within 40 days.
Requisitions also have to be done properly from the owners’ side. There is now a prescribed form, and fifteen pieces of information that have to be on it, including the purpose of the meeting and, where directors are being removed, the reasons why. Owners signing a requisition have to hold 15 per cent of the units, appear in the corporation’s record of owners, and be current on their common expenses. If the board turns a requisition down, the owners get a short window to fix it and resubmit, and after that a short window to take it to the Tribunal or to court. Both sides are working to short deadlines.
Non-Leased Voting Units
The second change is more straightforward. The old owner-occupied director’s position, which has long confused boards, is being replaced by something called a non-leased voting unit, and the reserved position becomes optional. It only exists if an owner actually asks for it within 15 days of the preliminary notice, and only where a minority of the units in the building are non-leased. In most buildings nobody will ask, and boards that have been quietly getting this wrong can stop worrying about it. There is no need to amend your by-laws to change the wording. The new language applies on its own. Fix it the next time you are amending for some other reason, purely so it stops confusing people at meetings.
This change does create one practical issue, and it is worth dealing with now. Whether a unit counts as non-leased is decided by the corporation’s own leasing records. If your record of leased units is out of date, you cannot say with confidence who is entitled to vote. The record has become evidence of who is entitled to vote, so it should be brought up to date this year.
Expanded Tribunal Jurisdiction
The Tribunal changes come six months later. From July 1, 2027 an owner can file an application about how a meeting was requisitioned or called, and that covers whether owners were told about their right to requisition, whether the preliminary notice went out properly, what the board did with the material an owner sent in, when the meeting has to be held, and whether an owner who had to call the meeting themselves gets their costs back.
What the Tribunal does not get is the meeting itself. Anything that happens at the meeting itself is outside its jurisdiction. So are proxies and advance voting. And if an application mixes the two, it falls outside the Tribunal’s jurisdiction altogether. The Tribunal will not be running your AGM, but it will be reviewing what happens in advance of one, which is where most disputes start. The Tribunal can also now award up to $50,000 in damages, and that figure applies to cases already underway.
What Boards Should Do Now
There are a few practical steps for boards now. Bring the leasing record up to date. Pass a resolution setting out where and how the corporation will accept a requisition, including by email, so nobody is improvising when one arrives. Put the 20 days in the diary the day a requisition comes in, and treat it as immovable, because silence is agreement. Keep the paper trail on the front end of every meeting, since that is precisely what the Tribunal will be looking at. And run your next AGM as though the new rules were already in force. That will show you where the gaps are while there is still time to fix them.
