21/11/2022 – Jurisdiction Ontario
Part 80 published on 01/12/2022
The CAT finds that a recording of an owners’ meeting was a record of the corporation. However, the owner did not have an applicable reason for the record request.
A special meeting of the owners was held on the Zoom video conferencing platform. The meeting was recorded to assist in creating minutes of the meeting. An owner requested a copy of the recording.
The Tribunal began by noting that a condominium’s records can include records that are not specifically listed in the Condominium Act or regulations. [Recordings of meetings are not specifically listed in the Condominium Act or regulations.] The Tribunal then concluded that the recording of the meeting was a record of the corporation (at least in this case) “because it was created and maintained by the corporation, for a purpose that is related to the ongoing role of managing the corporation”. The Tribunal distinguished the recording from minute-takers’ notes (which were found not to be records of a corporation, in another case). The Tribunal said:
The difference that the (condominium corporation) disregards, however, is that the minute-taker’s notes in Stewart were made by the minute-taker and constituted their own reflections on the meeting for their personal use in preparing the minutes. By contrast, in this case, the condominium created the recording. It is not a working draft, or personal impressions – it is a record created and maintained by the Respondent for its purposes.
Even though the Tribunal determined that the recording was a record of the corporation (in this case), the Tribunal nevertheless held that the owner was not entitled to the recording because the owner’s request was made for a purpose that was not “solely related to that person’s interests as an owner, a purchaser or a mortgagee of a unit, as the case may be, having regard to the purposes of the Act.”
The Tribunal said:
This request extends beyond a legitimate interest in the content of the record, and is focused on rewriting minutes to meet the Applicant’s expectations. Therefore, I find that the Applicant is not entitled to the record.