What Was Supposed to Happen on July 1
If a property manager or board member read the condo law coverage over the past year, they were told to expect a change on July 1, 2026: the Condominium Authority Tribunal (CAT) would begin hearing disputes about owners' meetings. Whether a corporation held its required annual meeting. Whether notice went out within the mandated timelines. Whether that notice included everything it legally had to.
It didn't happen. As of this writing, the Condominium Authority's own jurisdiction page still lists meeting-related issues as outside the Tribunal's authority. Quorum, voting, and meeting notices are explicitly named as excluded. The proposal went through consultation, a date got floated publicly, and the amendment has not taken effect. Current reporting on the legislation now points to July 1, 2027, alongside an increase in the CAT's maximum damages award to $50,000 and a new mandatory form for owner-requisitioned meetings starting December 31, 2026.
That's worth knowing in both directions. Boards that tightened their meeting-notice procedures in anticipation haven't wasted the effort, but they're not yet answerable to a tribunal over a missed annual meeting or a late notice. Boards that were waiting to see whether the change landed before adjusting anything have more time than the original notices suggested. Worth noting too: the CAT's new authority, whenever it arrives, will still stop at whether the meeting happened and was properly noticed. How the meeting itself was run, including how votes were conducted or counted, stays outside its reach.
The Jurisdiction That's Already Been Exclusive for Six Years
While the meeting-dispute expansion gets the headlines, a different piece of the CAT's authority is easy to skim past because it isn't new. Since October 1, 2020, the Tribunal has held jurisdiction over disputes concerning provisions in a condo corporation's governing documents that deal with pets, vehicles, parking, and storage, sometimes shorthanded as "PVPS" disputes. Nearly six years now.
What makes this piece worth a board's attention isn't the topic. It's the structure. For disputes that fall within the CAT's PVPS jurisdiction, the Condominium Act closed off the traditional alternatives. A resident can't take a parking dispute to court, and a board can't route it to private arbitration instead. The Tribunal's own process, negotiation, then its own mediation stage, then adjudication if it doesn't settle, is the only venue where the dispute actually gets resolved. Nobody is choosing a forum. The forum is fixed, and it's an online system built around whatever documentation the parties bring to it.
That last part is the operative detail. The CAT decides based on what's put in front of it, not what a board remembers happening, and not what a security officer recalls from a shift three weeks earlier. What's actually documented, timestamped, and attributable is what carries weight.
Why the Documentation Gap Shows Up at the Worst Time
Most parking enforcement is uncontested. A vehicle is towed for blocking a fire route, the owner knows it, and nothing further happens. The gap in most buildings' records only becomes visible when someone disputes an enforcement action. By definition, that's exactly the moment a thin record costs the most.
A tow that was entirely correct can still take weeks to defend if the only evidence is a single line in a shift log. No photograph, no timestamp beyond the log entry itself, no record of whether anyone tried to contact the unit before the vehicle was removed. None of that changes whether the enforcement was right. It changes how long it takes, and how many board meetings get spent on it, to establish that it was.
The fix isn't more paperwork. It's specificity, captured in the minute or two after the incident rather than reconstructed afterward.
What a Parking Record Needs to Survive a Challenge
A record built to withstand a CAT dispute, or simply a resident's pointed question at a board meeting, needs a handful of specific elements. Most of them take under a minute to capture at the time.
A single timestamped photograph showing the vehicle, the plate, and the sign or marking it's in breach of. One frame containing all three elements is worth more than three separate frames each containing one. It's the difference between evidence and an assertion that needs corroborating.
The plate, make, and colour written out as text, not left implicit in the image. Photos get compressed, forwarded between phones, and sometimes rotated or cropped along the way. Text in the log survives all of that. An image's fine detail doesn't always.
The specific rule or by-law provision, quoted rather than summarized. "Parked illegally" is an opinion. "Fire route, contrary to Rule 14(b)" is a finding a tribunal can evaluate against the governing documents directly.
The time the notice was issued and the time enforcement followed. The gap between those two timestamps is typically the first thing a dispute goes after. Was there adequate warning, or was enforcement immediate and disproportionate.
Who observed the violation, by name and role. An unattributed log entry, "security noted a vehicle in violation," carries very little weight compared to an entry tied to a specific person accountable for the observation.
Whether anyone attempted to reach the unit, and what happened. Boards get asked this question constantly once a dispute reaches them, and it's rarely already written down. Recording the attempt, even when it went unanswered, closes off one of the most common lines of challenge.
None of this is complicated to capture. Almost none of it can be reconstructed with any confidence a month after the fact, once the only surviving record is a memory and a one-line log entry.
The Broader Point for Boards
The CAT's exclusive jurisdiction over PVPS disputes means a board doesn't get to pick its venue when a resident disputes an enforcement action. It does get to decide what record shows up when that dispute reaches the Tribunal. A thorough record doesn't just make a correct enforcement decision easier to defend. It shortens the whole process, because there's less left to establish once everyone is looking at the same documented facts.
The meeting-dispute expansion may or may not land on its next proposed date. The PVPS jurisdiction already has, and it has for years. Building the documentation habit now costs a fraction of what defending a thin file costs later.
Our Approach
Chromium Guard's on-site teams document parking and vehicle enforcement to the standard this piece describes as a matter of course: photograph, plate, cited rule, timestamps, and observer of record, captured at the time rather than reconstructed after a dispute lands. If your current provider's shift logs would survive a CAT filing, that's worth knowing before one arrives. If they wouldn't, that's worth knowing sooner. Request an assessment to see what a properly documented enforcement file looks like for your building.