Condo conflicts on the rise, lawyer says
By James Rusk - Globe and Mail
Fights involving condo owners and condo boards are one of the most rapidly growing areas of law in Canada, a Toronto lawyer who specializes in condominium law said yesterday.
“We’re at a situation now where I said: If they stop developing now, we’d still be busier than ever. But they are not. It is just unbelievable the kind of situations that come up,” Marko Djurdevac of the law firm of Deacon Spears Fedson & Montizambert said in an interview.
Mr. Djurdevac, who edits a newsletter on condominium law, said that the disputes can range from issues such as the three p’s - people, parking and pets - to matters such as fights over finances and repairs.
Since they are about people’s homes, the battles are often quite fierce and quite emotional. “In a condo, it is communal, and it is a highly political environment. People are very serious about everything that is going on, no matter how insignificant it may seem to a third-party observer,” he said.
Often condo corporations find themselves in court, fighting owners who do not understand either the limits on what they can do with their property or the line between personal property and common elements shared by all owners.
For instance, he once had to seek a court order preventing a townhouse owner who ran a construction company from keeping a commercial cement mixer in his garage and a construction truck in the common driveway.
As condominium law has evolved, provinces have sought ways to keep the disputes out of court, he noted.
Since 2001, Ontario law, borrowing from an earlier provision in British Columbia law, requires most disputes to go through a mandatory mediation-arbitration process before getting to court, and most provinces have similar rules, he said.
The exceptions to the arbitration process are cases involving a breach of the provincial condominium law itself, but judges have been clamping down on what they think are frivolous attempts to avoid arbitration, he said.
Even though the law prohibits an owner from damaging the common property of the condo corporation, he said, a judge refused to hear a suit brought by a condo corporation against an owner whose dog was urinating on lawns and flower beds and referred the case to arbitration.
On the other hand, he had a case where the courts moved quickly to issue a court order against a property owner with a history of mental problems who was setting fires in her unit.
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