The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - The Wild West of Condo Politics

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

In Ontario there is, sort of, another level of government for 1.3 million people that is not federal, provincial or municipal. But for those who live in ... condos. They have elections. They, kind of, pay taxes in their maintenance fees. And their boards are like the cabinet, with significant responsibilities, even if not all members have the skills to manage those multi-million-dollar corporations. What's working, what's not, and what degree of corruption are we seeing within condo boards?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Matt Nethersole. And I'm Tiff Lam. From TVO Podcasts, this is Queries. This season, we're asking, when it comes to defending your beliefs, how far is too far? We follow one story from the boardroom to the courtroom. And seek to understand what happens when beliefs collide. Where does freedom of religion end and freedom from discrimination begin? That's this season on Queries in Good Faith,

a TVO original podcast. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. We spend a lot of time on this program analyzing the exploits of the federal, provincial, and municipal orders of government. But there is sort of another level of government for the 1.3 million people in Ontario who live in condominiums.

They have elections, they kind of pay taxes in their maintenance fees, and their boards are like the cabinet with significant responsibilities, even if not all members have the skills to manage those multimillion dollar corporations. What's working and what's not in condo world? Let's find out from Lindsay McNally, Director of the Condominium Lending Group and former President of the Toronto Chapter of the Canadian Condominium Institute. Joy Matthews, founder of Matthews Condo Law.

Maria Damakis, lawyer with Dayo Condominium Lawyers. And Eric Plant, Director of Brilliant Property Management and President of the Association of Condominium Managers of Ontario. And it's great to have you four with us around our table here tonight. Lindsay, I want to start with you because as we suggested in the opening, what a condo actually is may be a bit confusing. Is it a private company?

Is it a level of government? Is it a home? What is it? It's an important question because I think there's a bit of a gap in the average consumer or condo owner even knowing what it is that they own. So what people need to understand first is that a condominium corporation is not a style of construction. It's not your tower in the sky. It is a style of ownership. And this could be your towers. This could also be what people traditionally think is a single family home.

We do have lots of condos, particularly in Ontario, where it's standalone single-family homes that are part of a greater condominium corporation. The condominium corporation is created by way of a declaration, and that declaration sort of details what the condominium corporation is. And there's a number of legislation that impacts the way a condominium corporation operates. And that can be fairly complicated. Eric, do you want to add to that? It can be very complicated.

So a condominium is technically a self-governing, non-charitable, not-for-profit with an elected board of directors. I've been at this almost 15 years, and I don't know what I just said. It is 30 years ago, a condo was very much a self-contained building tower in the sky with a hundred units and a board of directors who could manage it. These days a condo is much more than that.

The scale and size have grown dramatically. These can be multi-million dollar corporations with purchases of upwards of 10 millions for certain assets that they need to replace. They have many shared facilities. They can contain restaurants, museums. I have one building that is a condo that shares facilities with a hotel and one of the units is a museum. And it is a Gordian knot to untangle who's responsible for what. So these things have gotten excessively complicated and the legislation has not. It has not kept up. We have the same legislation from 30 years ago. We'll come back to that later in our discussion.

Absolutely. Maria, you live in a condo? I sure do. What do you like about the lifestyle? Well, my condo building is an 80-unit building. I love the lifestyle as a single person. It doesn't have much to do. I don't have much to really canvas don't have much to, you know,

really canvas throughout in terms of getting outside work done. But my neighbours are great. I'm one of the lucky few that can say that. And I'm sure others in the community can probably enjoy and say they enjoy their condo buildings. But what I like about condo living is the decisions are made for you, whether you like them or you don't, you contribute to the cost of them but you get to enjoy the benefits of condo living which are for the most part the services, the space, the building, the location. What you've just said sounds a lot like government.

It is exactly like government. Do you think of it as another level of government? You do. Absolutely do and it certainly is another level of government that's just highly ignored. It's not given the attention that it deserves, notwithstanding that it has very similar powers to municipal government. What's the flip side of that? You love certain aspects of condo life, but not everything is wonderful.

What don't you like? When you buy into a condo, you have to give up certain freedoms. You're not your own decision maker or the king or queen of your castle. Other people make those decisions on behalf of the collective, not the individual unit owner interest. Sometimes they can come into conflict with one another, but in the end you have to accept that it's a balancing act for the people that govern. Okay, that's where I get you involved here because we have seen in regular politics how

toxic things can get. How stinky can condo politics get? Well, it does stink quite a bit. Depends on who you talk to as well too, and just on the theme of what a condo is. Most people who buy into a condo have no idea what a condo is. They think it's either a house or an apartment,

and it's neither. It's this creature that we've been talking about that's regulatory, it's got a board of directors that you elect, you got owners in there, you may have tenants in there. So at any one time, you got different disputes happening. And no one really knows who owns what or who's responsible for what. But you have to point your fingers at everybody all the time. Well, Eric, here's what's interesting.

When I watch Doug Ford and Marit Stiles go at it during question period, and then when it's over, they each go home to different parts of the city. When a condo board meeting is over, the people who've been yelling at each other for the last hour and a half or two hours get on the same elevator and go to their homes. How awkward can this get? It's the way I describe it.

It's kind of like Kamala Harris living next to Donald Trump. And they both parked their car next to JD Vance. It can be very, very contentious. So boards of directors are made up of elected officials from the building. And these people can be absolutely incredible, you know, people with tons of experience that offer a lot to their building

and guide it in the right direction. Others are the people that didn't like the lilacs out front because they wanted daisies. And they decided, I'm going to run a multimillion dollar company as revenge. So you get a very mixed bag of people. And that's where a lot of this conflict can come in. They hire companies like mine to manage, but they are the executive decision makers.

Because they live in the building, you tend to get a bit more micromanagement because they see and they hear everything. Lindsay, was he being facetious there when he said sometimes you can get fights between people because they wanted daisies and not lilas? Absolutely. There's a whole body of case law, which Maria and Joy could talk about for hours, about cases that have gone to the courts where there's been an aesthetic decision that's been made at a condo, and people took issue with it. Do people have the training to do these jobs? They're not paid, right, to be on a condo board? They're not paid to be on a condo board. So why does anybody want to do it?

Because the alternative is that no one does and then your values plummet. People buy into condos for different reasons. They could buy into condos as a means to maintain some, a sense of financial stability. Others buy into a condo for lifestyle purposes. That's the reason why I bought into a condo. Your objectives when you buy into a condo, which regardless of what led you to make that, led you to make that decision is ultimately that you want to maintain the value if not improve the value. And so there is always a tension in condo communities where, let's take the daisies

versus the, what was it, the roses? The lilacs. You're going to have these tensions because people see value in different ways. Now condo boards, for the most part, have become much more sophisticated over the 20 years that I've been practicing in this area. They weren't as sophisticated in the past, but the reason they've become more sophisticated is there is more education out there.

They may be volunteers. Many come from either current professional backgrounds or past professional backgrounds that lend definitely value to governance. They can make very sound business decisions. They can manage the community side with the business side as best as possible. But notwithstanding that they're volunteers, notwithstanding that there is no condo schooling, there is mandatory training at present.

How valuable that is, at minimum it provides at least some concepts to understand. Okay, Joy, let me follow up with you on this. I've met lots of politicians over the years who get into politics because they like the notion of wielding power. Is it the same at a condo board? You have different varieties of people who like to run for a board. Some actually want to do the right thing

and maintain the financial strength of the condo. They have a passion project. They want to get EV charters in. They want to update the renovation of the lobby. And then you have people who just don't go away. And they're the ones sometimes you have to be worried about because there's a natural succession planning that's

important for healthy democracy. And it's a self-governing structure. So there's no term limits in condo world. There could be if you pass a buy-off. Oh, OK. Now, you've got to get the owners to be involved with that process as well, too. But it's not unheard of to have certain directors be on the board for not just five years, 10 years, 15 years.

And at a certain point, if they have full control of that condo, they basically run that place. Let's make the comparisons to governments again. Eric, come on in here. If governments don't collect enough taxes from their citizens, the roads go to pot, the schools go to pot, you know, the list is endless about how things will start to deteriorate. I presume it's the same for condos. If you don't get enough in maintenance fees to keep the place going, the building goes to you-know-what.

Two things can happen. Number one, correct, the condo will deteriorate. But there's certain things that you can't let deteriorate. You can't let the elevators break down. People need to get to their homes. So what will happen is if a condo finds itself in a position where there isn't enough money, unlike other levels of government,

we can levy what's called a special assessment, or the board can levy a special assessment. How much a tax? And that's essentially a one-time tax of however much you need. And people have to pay it. Within 90 days, you can put a lien on the unit and it can go to power sale if it's not paid. How much can that special assessment be? As much as it needs to be. Like a hundred grand? Lindsay will speak a bit

more to this because she's into the condo lending side but I took over a building once and two months afterwards got something from the engineers saying we need a special assessment of 60,000 on average per unit. Some of the larger units would have been over 150. And we spent months fighting back and finding new engineers and new lawyers and we got it down to about 15 but that can happen in buildings. You typically make the news when you're that high but it's devastating for homeowners because you can lose your home. So maybe you should explain what you do because obviously some people who get hit with a 60,

70, 80 thousand dollar assessment, they don't have that money hanging around and they can't pay it. So what happens? Of course or if the special assessment is high enough they may not even have sufficient equity in their home so that they could borrow it under their own power and that's really where I come in. So my business focus is all about making sure that condominium corporations can maintain affordability for their owners and And the point is that there's always options. A special assessment is a built-in opportunity for the board of directors to essentially let the attacks and say we need to make this repair, pay this money. But you know

when there's circumstances that this causes significant financial hardship to the individual unit owners the corporation can consider borrowing the money. A lot of people don't realize that condo corporations are themselves commercial entities. They can borrow money under their own credit. But a significant barrier actually is the apathy of the owners in the individual condominium corporations. That's the same in democracy too. Yeah.

Joy introduced earlier the idea of a bylaw, right? So you can use bylaws in condominium corporations to change the way that it operates and to empower the board to do specific things. In order to borrow money, a condominium corporation must pass a bylaw and the threshold for passing the bylaw is a majority of all owners in the condominium corporation. Not just the majority who vote, but the majority of owners. That's correct. So it's really incumbent upon you to make sure everybody's engaged. Yes, and when we look at some of the historical numbers

in terms of participation in municipal elections, a majority is really hard to achieve just getting people out. And then not only do you need to get them there, you need to get them to vote in favour. So the apathetic owners are a challenge, and then also there are lots of people who will go out of their way to block necessary repairs and block necessary funding options because they disagree with what is maybe better for the majority. It doesn't work for them as an individual. And Maria spoke earlier about you know when you buy into a condominium corporation, you

get certain liberties, but takes away certain rights. Condo boards are stuck in a hard place sometimes. They have to make difficult decisions that affect hundreds of families. Well, let me follow up on that. Maria, if we know that when governments raise taxes, some people absolutely hit the roof. Absolutely. Is it the same in condo world? Absolutely, they will hit the roof. Financial insecurity for most people

is the cause for hitting the roof. There may be people who are opposed to funding or some expenditure on a principled basis, but really it's about the financial insecurity or financial stress that it creates. So whether we're talking about the special assessment and that one-time tax, or we're talking about the special assessment and that one-time tax or we're talking about long-term funding, it creates additional pressure.

People do hit the roof. People do want to hold their decision-makers accountable. In condo, it's pretty difficult to do that because the board does wield a lot of power. The avenues available to owners are few and far between and not easy to achieve. So yes, people hit the roof, they feel helpless because their options are quite limited. I want to ask all of you to look at the monitors either on the walls or up top there of one of the most distressing things I've

ever seen and that is I'm going to show you some before and after pictures. Sheldon, you want to bring these up. This is in Surfside, Florida. It's a condo building called, I think, the Champlain Towers. And they didn't keep as robust a fund for maintenance as they should have. And let's flip over to the next picture. In June of 2021, one of the towers literally in the middle of the night, collapsed. Nearly 100 people were killed as they slept. And I guess, Joy, start us off on this.

How much of a wake-up call was this for people who live in condos and condo boards? Well, first, Florida is different than Ontario with respect to legislation, so we shouldn't compare apples and oranges a bit. But the idea here is that you've got politics. My view on this is this was a political issue. The board who was in charge of that building deferred decisions that were hard decisions, probably related to the stuff that we've been talking about here.

There's political decisions to be made. They may have to make hard decisions, special assessments, raise maintenance fees, or borrow money. And they didn't want to do it. Exactly. And as a result, they were very popular, I guess, with the people who lived in the building because they kept the maintenance fees down.

But look what happened. And on that point in Ontario, we got a cyclical problem. Special assessments is a dirty word, but there are three ways to increase maintenance fees. You increase maintenance fees or borrow money, as Lindsay mentioned as well, or special assess. But some condos don't do that. And what they do is every three to five years, they have to special assess. But then the board gets turned out because there's a political upheaval. And then the board changes but then they don't do anything. Three to five years later they have to special assess

and that board gets kicked out. Are maintenance fees high enough in the province of Ontario? Generally speaking, are they robust enough in order to prevent buildings from falling down? It really depends. In some buildings absolutely and others not at all. What happened since 2020 is we've had a period of inflation starting mostly to prevent buildings from falling down? It really depends. In some buildings, absolutely, and others, not at all. What happened since 2020 is we've had a period of inflation starting mostly 21, 22. Inflation in the general public hit about 7%, 8%.

Construction price index in Toronto, anyways, hit about 100%. So if you're a building and you're preparing to do your windows, let's say, because they're all falling apart and drafts are coming in, you save $2 million to do the windows. but you don't do it because it takes time and politically it's difficult. Three years later, you get to 2024, 2025, that project might be $6 million now.

That windows were a bad one. They about tripled. So most buildings have some sort of situation like that where they were saving for some amount of money for some project, inflation hit, and now they're drastically underfunded. And that's leading to either loans or special assessments or steep increases to maintenance fees. Or a combination of all of them. The problem with condos is politically, it's very difficult for a board to do what's necessary.

Just like in federal, provincial, municipal governments, it's very difficult to actually pass that, you know, that rule or that bylaw to raise that. When that doesn't happen, you get situations like Surfside, where a building gets so in such bad shape that any attempt to fix it would cost so much that whoever's trying to fix it gets kicked off the board, fired, whatever the case is until you have a catastrophe. I should add something about inflation, because when people talk about inflation, typically in the news you hear about inflation, Bank of Canada takes measures against it, most of the time you're talking about consumer price index inflation, the cost

for a basket of goods. When we talk about inflation in condos, particularly as it relates to capital repairs, it's really construction inflation which is a totally different measure. So if we look at the StatsCan Residential Construction Price Index, let's start from 2020 when we had the big pandemic, which changed a lot of the financial outlook for our world. From the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2023, inflation in Toronto was 71% construction inflation, and inflation for Canada overall was about 50%.

So when you assume people think consumer price index were aiming for 2 to 3%, over that same period of time, people are thinking, oh, my condo fees are going to go up 12%. And that's just not realistic. And when you apply these huge inflation measures against these multimillion dollar projects, the impact is really significant. And when we look to the history of inflation, consumer price versus construction price, there's an interesting report by the Canadian Institute of Actuaries

that shows us the history between the two as it relates to our capital repairs and condos. And construction inflation has outpaced consumer price inflation every year for at least 20 years. How much of a wake-up call was Surfside to people who had condos in Ontario? Well to dovetail off of a point that Joe made, sorry Joy made, you should know that we've worked together for years, apologies, but we are comparing oranges and apples. Ontario, unlike Florida, has had legislation in effect mandating reserve funds since at least 2001.

And so every condo will have a reserve fund. Whether it's adequately funded or not is a separate question. But every condo will have a reserve fund. Surfside was a little bit different because in Florida you don't have these mandatory reserve requirements. There was also a difference in as much as there was a suspicion that the people who were inspecting the building couldn't do a good job. Correct. Here you've got a duty on engineers especially those in the structural discipline that they have a duty to warn. There are buildings that are surfside ready in Toronto in

the GTA. Surfside ready that if you don't catch it in time, even if that means putting an order to comply in the property and vacating it, you could have a surfside disaster. There are the few but they're very few. The more likely scenario you're going to have here is the envelope deteriorating so whether that's water coming in, air coming in, the underground garage where it's spalling or it's cracking or the roof is not keeping the elements out. That tough decision call by one group of people to raise the funds.

Hopefully we don't get surfside in Ontario, but the one positive thing that our government did back in 1998 is create this mandatory reserve fund requirement. Nobody, no condo board wants to go to its annual meeting where it's at minimum accountable to the owners at one time of year and tell owners we're not in line with our funding plan. Got it.

Eric, you're the condo management guy, so I want to bring you in on this one. As we hear in the world of politics, sometimes there's, you you know shenanigans no I would even go so far as to say illegalities sometimes it happens not often but sometimes interesting in condo world one hears stories all the time about management people who run the building essentially for the people who live in it and they've got their little sweetheart deals on the side about you

know steering business to their friends and this kind of thing How much of that goes on? It does go on I won't say it doesn't it goes on not just with the management companies But with boards of directors with engineers overseeing projects so so fraud can can happen in a variety of ways In the management world we now have licensing so in 2017 licensing was introduced we We have to have a license we can lose that license if there are complaints against us we have to do continuing education so that I think has gone in the right direction directors less so there hasn't been as much legislative change on the director

side so you do see the same thing if you have one very powerful board president let's say the condo commandos or the dictators we call them Those people can absolutely do the same thing anyone who can call a contractor can make themselves a deal We in the in the industry have tried our best to weed out those people We've tried to stop them, but it does it does still happen. Unfortunately in America as we know from Donald Trump if you Well, I'll keep it neutral here. If you do things that are controversial, you can be impeached.

Is there a way to impeach members of a board who overstep? Absolutely. There's a process called a requisition, where the owners come together, requisition a meeting of all owners to remove that director in the need to the term. You need 15% of those thresholds. You need 15% of all owners assigned a requisition,

a piece of paper, serve it on the board. The board has to call a meeting within 35 days to either keep or not keep that director. But they need 51% of the owners to agree for the removal. So there is an impeachment process. OK. Everybody get comfortable here, because I want to just do a bit of background on, I mean, thankfully, this

doesn't happen very much. But it happened a couple of years ago in the Greater Toronto area and it was absolutely terrifying. I'm going to talk about what happened in Vaughan, Ontario. A 73-year-old man decided to take out his rage on a condo board by murdering five people in the building. The police ended up killing the shooter. This was two years after the man claimed that the board was tormenting and torturing him

with electromagnetic waves that were coming from an improperly constructed electrical room. The board tried to kick him out of the building, and they were in the midst of a legal process to do that. But clearly, he struck first and ended up killing a bunch of his neighbors. Again, okay, Lindsay, what impact did this have in condo world in Ontario?

Well, certainly there was a lot of sadness, you know, because there are a lot of condominium communities that have similar difficulties with unit owners, and it is hard to see that type of violence coming. Everyone working in the industry who's been to difficult meetings, who have had to do difficult enforcements against unit owners, we've all been in the position where we've been a little bit scared but we hope that nothing like that will ever happen. Have you ever been on the receiving end of that kind of, not that kind of violence obviously obviously but something that made you

uncomfortable? So a bit of extra background about me is that I started my career as a condo manager. I have almost 20 years experience sort of in the operations of a condominium corporation and one of the reasons that I left condo management not the only one but one of the reasons was that I was attacked at an owner's meeting and And thankfully I was not harmed. People were there to react quickly enough. But I- When you say attacked, what does that mean?

One of the unit owners tried to climb the table just like we're sitting at to attack me. And the reason was because in my capacity as chairperson of that meeting, I had the unfortunate reason to tell him to sit down and to stop yelling at the meeting because we were trying to conduct business. The reason for that meeting was to talk about the budget. And it was very minor increases to the budget for that condo that year, if any. This individual was known to be hot under the collar, was known to use drugs,

but we couldn't prevent him from coming and have his democratic opportunity to have a voice in the governing of his condo. Was there security at the meeting? No. Maria, let me ask you, should there be security at condominium meetings? 20 years ago it used to be the norm. When I first started out as a young condo lawyer we had two rules. Security, off-duty police officers or private security and the table situated by the exit door

why because of exactly what lindsay mentioned it not not that that's changed much but security is no longer a go-to thought process for most boards insecurity still exists because of hot temperatures because of anger because of erosion of civility in our society and taking it out on the people where you live, who you think are at fault for them making your space less comfortable, less capable of being financed, less capable of being financially doable for you.

Can I just add in there? Please. This is a particularly difficult situation for all con lawyers and anyone in the industry as well too. We've all been assaulted at every point. Seriously. It's such a common theme. Yeah, absolutely.

This is probably worse than the surfside issue, because this is about dealing with people. It's endemic now. Condos, exactly. It's endemic. And the way I see it, you've got to take a step back, because we just don't have the tools necessary to deal with this stuff. And the reason why we don't have the tools is because we're taking a reactive approach to these type of problems within the condo. And it's a bigger picture, and it's not an easy solution by any means,

but there's three different spheres that are playing here. We've got the criminal world, we call the cops, something serious happens. Then you have the mental health world, where if they're sick, they go to the hospital. And you have the condo world. The condo world sticks in the middle of these three spheres. Unsupported. Unsupported. And most people who have issues are in that middle,

where they're not violent enough to call the cops on. They're not sick enough to get them hospitalized. And they're not enough of a nuisance for us to send letters and do stuff. But yet we've got to do something. And nothing really gets done. Have you been physically assaulted? See, the difference with me, a little bit, and to be fair,

I am a little taller. You're tall. To be fair, he points at me, I'm taller. Devilishly handsome looking, studly man. Ages effect in all of us in different ways. But that being said, and I had martial arts training background, but you don't need to be a martial artist to cheer an owner's meeting at a condo.

That shouldn't be a prerequisite. The level of civility is missing. And so when these situations happen, the boards, frankly, who are in charge of stuff, do one of two things. They either ignore the problem or they enforce it. And neither really work. Ignoring the problem just becomes a point in the finger or it tells management, do something. Management tells the lawyer, lawyer calls the cops, cops tell the board, and nothing gets done. You're all sitting at the hate table where you get attacked.

Precisely, and then the enforcement side is that it costs money, time, and it's not actually solving the problem. Have you been physically assaulted? I have been, the last time was July of this year, 2024. What happened? Well, much like Lindsay, you're at an owner's meeting, I was asked to chair that meeting,

you find yourself in that position, Joy, and I'm sure Eric does as well very often. As the chairperson, you're the one who's in charge of controlling the meeting, observing, and making sure people observe rules of order. Well, before we even got started, the topic of the day, coincidentally, was a funding. This condo needed $14 million to do some major envelope

and underground garage work. Of course, the condo didn't have 14 million dollars. It needed to borrow and it was putting before that owner group two options. Either we tax you your share of that 14 million or we borrow the 14 million. The announcement in the lead time or in the lead up to that meeting was we're going to have the lawyer present, the engineer present to help explain everything. Well, before we got started, somebody said, are you the lawyer? Yes, great.

Before I look over to the side, before I know it, someone grabs my neck, turns me around, and just throws a punch. You are kidding. I am not kidding. What did you do? Well, I punched back. Actually.

Maria's tough. Yeah. You don't want to punch Maria. You don't punch the interview person. Well, and that speaks to the management, too. They have to be tough to stick around this industry. Who would ever take that kind of job environment to work in? Well, I can speak to that if that's okay. We have a manager shortage right now, and one of the reasons is exactly that. Is exactly this.

To answer your future question, I have been insulted as well, not in a meeting, but by an owner who trapped me in the little condo office at the site. The more common scenario. More common. That's the most common scenario. So, I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say

that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that I'm not going to say that To answer your future question, I've been insulted as well. Not in a meeting, but by an owner who trapped me in the little condo office at the site.

The more common scenario. That's more common. That's the more common daily scenario. And that happens all the time as well. But through various reasons, we have a shortage of managers. And one of the reasons is that. Now, the management career is a great career. It's very interesting.

Its pays have gone up because of the shortage, which is also nice. But that is a serious issue. When you have to go and share a meeting in front of a crowd of angry people because maybe not your fault, maybe some previous manager or board of directors hadn't done something right, and you're in a position like that where your building is $10 million behind, it is not an easy thing to face a group of individuals and tell them, hey, you each need to pay 100 grand or take on a loan that you're going to be paying off for years.

Very challenging. Did you get hit? No, I had a letter opener near me, and I grabbed it, and I scared the guy off. But it came this close. Crazy how we have these stories. Oh, no, I have more than that one. It's common.

It's not uncommon. Put it that way. I must say, I'm a little taken aback. I had no idea it was this bad. There's insecurity in condominiums, but more so for the workers. I must say, I'm a little taken aback. I had no idea it was this bad. There's insecurity in condominiums, but more so for the workers. You can have owner to owner, neighbor to neighbor conflict.

But the reality is the most profound insecurity in condominiums is towards the people that work there. It is the managers, it is the security guards, it could be the janitorial staff. People who work there are the front line and the go-between between the ownership group and the board of directors that makes the decisions. For better or for worse, they're at fault

for when things go wrong. They are never complemented when things go right. But at minimum and on a daily basis, they are people's abusive sounding board. Just a tumble check on that. With the licensing since 2017, the shortage existed for a lot of reasons. One is your manager is balancing the free market system of a contract where if they don't do what the board wants they may get fired and the contract goes and they lose their job. On

the other side the CMRIO complaint process and licensing agency can have applications levied by anybody against them and then the license is purchased. So the burnout and the stress that managers are going through is incredible in this industry. But add into that the the devolution of how people care how people can communicate with one another the lack of communication it's it goes back to just that erosion of civility. There are angry people that go home each and every day that take their anger out on those people that they find in their home. Well in which case, all right, we got less

than five minutes to go here. Let's pitch some ideas on what you do if you were in charge to improve condo life. Go ahead, Lindsay, start us off. Oh put me in the hot seat. So I mean for me, my perspective, what I see every day in my career is that people are really struggling financially in today's economy. And the problems that are going on in reserve funds, reserve funding in condos and funding level in condos in general, they're having a real impact on people. And so there are a number of ways that the Canadian Economy and Human Institute, the organization that I represented as past president, we have put forward recommendations to, we'll call them the regulators because there's a few

players in the industry that regulate condos, but we've put these ideas forward and they haven't been implemented. And to be honest, we've known since at least 2015 that we had funding problems in reserve funds in the province of Ontario. Then in 2020, the Auditor General released a report that said, 69% of condominium corporations don't have enough in the reserve funds. Are you looking for taxpayer money to help buttress that? No, what we're, in my experience, you know, we talk a lot about fault. We use that word a few times here.

In my experience, most of the time, it's not anyone's fault. People are doing, most people are doing the best they can within, most of the time, it's not anyone's fault. People are doing, most people are doing, the best they can within the framework of the legislation, what guides them to do, right? So if we don't fix what the legislation requires in terms of funding levels, we're never gonna get any closer to having the right amount of funding.

If some of these regulations were implemented, there would be some short-term pain, you know, there would be a sharp rise in condo fees right away, the right amount of funding. If some of these regulations were implemented, there would be some short-term pain. There would be a sharp rise in condo fees right away. But when financial challenges happen in the future, at least all these condos would have more of a financial cushion. They would be wiggling closer to the right level.

Eric, what do you suggest? There are a lot of things. My key, just from the manager's point of view, is, as it was spoken about before, directors who get on the boards who really shouldn't be on there, they're very difficult to remove. And Joy mentioned the process before

about requisitioning a meeting, getting 50 plus 1% of the owners. In a lot of buildings, the owners are offsite. In a lot of buildings, the board will do whatever they can to make that process difficult. They won't share information. They won't call the meeting. So it's hard to get rid of bad people. Managers have licensing now. If there's a bad manager out there who does something wrong,

steals, has a sweetheart deal with a contractor, they'll lose their license. There's no such thing for directors. And I understand the philosophy of self-governance. You elect people and we see how well that works at other levels of government. But there should be some oversight. Maybe not a government body that can kick off a director, but one that maybe can lower the threshold for the community to do that themselves in the event of wrongdoing.

Joy would probably disagree with me on this. We just had a bit of a discussion about this in the lobby. But that would help, because some of these directors get in, and they don't leave. It's an ego thing for them. They don't want to go. And they can cause tremendous damage for their communities.

I've got less than two minutes. Let me get 45 seconds from each of you. OK, so for me, communities, mental health, that would be the focus. And with that, it should be a question of not if someone gets sick, but when any one of us could get sick. Legislation should be there to protect us. So for example, if a guy's coming to the management

office asking for the party room access, but he isn't pants on, that's not really a thing you call the cops on necessarily. It may not be, it's a problem. But it's a problem, yeah. So why don't we have, and often when I get these type of calls, the first question I ask, I don't need a lawyer's letter for that.

Is there a friend or family can that person call? And there's nothing in the file because it's not a mandatory thing to have a number ready to go in case you lose yourself. Condo boards need support in my view. I think we can have condo police out there for condo boards in the end. The crux of some of the core issues in the condo community are financial. They are people generated, but as a fourth level of government, they are highly abandoned. The resources out there are keeping up with that abandonment.

It is, you have a lot of power board of directors, exercise your power versus getting the police support or other public body support. So condo boards need to be supported. If they're supported, managers will be supported. And then, you know, you can start changing the tide on some of those challenging dynamics. Gotcha.

Boy, that was fascinating, guys. And I'm really worried about your physical safety going forward, so please take care. Let's thank Lindsay McNally from the condo lending group and Eric Plant, owner of Brilliant Property Management and the president of the Association of Condominium Managers of Ontario. And on the other side of the table are two lawyers, Joy Matthews, owner of Matthews Condominium

Law, Maria Demakis, lawyer with Dayo Condominium Law. Thanks so much everybody, that was terrific. Thank you. Thank you very much.