January 2024
The Condominium Authority of Ontario (CAO) is proposing an anti-harassment rule and seeking comment. The rule is intended to help condo corporations build clear, consistent and transparent processes for addressing the prevention, preparedness and response to harassment in their respective communities.
Less clear is why such a rule is necessary, why the CAO is now drafting rules for condominium corporations, and why it requires eight pages.
Most condo rules are restricted to a few sentences at most. A single community can have dozens of rules that owners must abide by. If all rules were drafted with this degree of legalese, they would be unintelligible and ignored. Rather than a few pages of rules, they would expand to hundreds of pages.
Increasingly, CAO seems out of touch with its mandate and seemingly under the influence of lawyers or legislators incapable of writing in a simple and comprehensible manner. If each rule were to be of this length and complexity, nobody in a condominium community would ever read let alone respect or comply with them.
CAO seems intent on making life more unworkable and unmanageable for condominium communities.
The CAO is seeking feedback to refine and improve this rule. Review the sample here.
