The Question Boards Ask, and the One They Don't
Most condo boards ask one question before signing a security contract: is this company PSISA-licensed and insured? It's a fair question. It's also, by this point, almost the wrong one — nearly every legitimate vendor operating in the GTA can answer yes.
The Private Security and Investigative Services Act, 2005 (S.O. 2005, c. 34) sets that floor. Section 30 prohibits anyone from holding a business licence to sell security services without carrying insurance of the kinds and in the amounts prescribed by regulation, and under the Act's regulations, every individual guard needs their own licence too: a 40-hour Ministry-approved training course, current first aid, a passed Ministry test. An agency that can't produce a licence number and current officer licences on request isn't operating legally. Our companion piece on the legal side of security reporting covers that baseline and what PSISA leaves out of the documentation question specifically. This one is about the contract.
But the Act stops there. It sets minimum standards for who is allowed to operate. It says nothing about what that operator is contractually obligated to do for your building. Whether your corporation is named on the insurance policy, what happens when a scheduled guard doesn't show up, what a "complete" incident report actually contains, how much notice you get before your rate goes up: none of that is regulated. It's negotiated, or it isn't negotiated at all, and most boards find out which one happened only after something goes wrong.
Budget season runs roughly August through October for most GTA corporations, which means a lot of security contracts are up for renewal right now, often with the same terms carried forward from the last signature without anyone rereading them. Here's what's worth rereading.
The Insurance Clause
"The vendor carries commercial general liability insurance" is a sentence that sounds like protection and often isn't, not for your corporation specifically. A vendor can be fully insured and your building can still have no direct claim against that policy, because the corporation was never added to it.
What the clause should say is that your condo corporation is named as an additional insured on the vendor's policy, not merely that the vendor is insured somewhere. The difference matters at the exact moment it would matter: when there's a claim. A named additional insured generally has standing to make a claim directly, though the exact protection depends on how the endorsement is worded, which is a question for your own broker, not this article. A corporation that's only the client of an insured vendor is relying on that vendor to make the claim on its behalf, and to do so promptly, and in a way that serves the corporation's interests rather than the vendor's.
Ask for the certificate of insurance, not just the sentence in the contract that says one exists. Confirm the corporation's legal name is on it, correctly spelled, and check the renewal date against your contract's term. A policy that lapses six months into a two-year contract is a gap nobody notices until it's needed.
The Termination Clause
Two very different things get called "termination" in a service agreement: termination for cause, and termination for convenience. A contract that only offers the first one is a contract you can't leave even if the relationship isn't working, unless you can prove a specific breach, which is a higher bar than "we're not satisfied."
Read for both. For cause should define what counts as a breach and how it gets cured or doesn't. For convenience should state a real notice period in writing, not "reasonable notice," which means whatever the vendor decides it means until a court says otherwise. In our experience sixty to ninety days is a reasonable range to ask for. Anything under thirty days is worth a conversation, because finding, vetting, and onboarding a new vendor properly doesn't happen in two weeks.
The Shift-Coverage Guarantee
Every board wants to hear "we guarantee coverage." Few contracts actually write down what that guarantee obligates the vendor to do when a scheduled officer calls in sick, quits, or simply doesn't show.
A real shift-coverage clause specifies a response: a backup roster, a maximum gap before a replacement is on site, and what the corporation is owed — a credit, a make-good shift, a notification requirement — if coverage is missed anyway. Without that written down, "guarantee" is a marketing word, not a contract term, and the first uncovered overnight shift is where a board finds out which one it signed.
The Reporting-Format Clause
"Monthly reports will be provided" tells you that paperwork will exist. It tells you nothing about whether that paperwork is useful, which is a different question and the one that actually matters if an incident ever needs to be reconstructed for a board, an insurer, or a tribunal.
A reporting clause worth having specifies what a complete incident entry contains: date, time, location, parties involved by role, the responding officer, and the resolution, timestamped at the point of entry rather than written up days later from memory. It's worth naming a retention period too. Twenty-four months is a reasonable baseline to ask for, with a hold applied to anything tied to an open complaint or claim. If your current contract is silent on format and retention, your vendor is deciding both, and you may not know what either one is until you need a specific record and it isn't there in the form you needed it.
The Licensing and Renewal Clauses
Two smaller items round this out. First, the contract should require the agency's licence number and current officer licences to be on file and produced without a special request, not asserted once at signing and never revisited. Licences lapse; staff turns over. Second, check the renewal mechanics: how much notice you get before a rate increase, and whether the agreement auto-renews if nobody acts by a certain date. An auto-renewal clause isn't inherently a problem, but a board should know it's there rather than discover it the month after the window to renegotiate has closed.
What This Looked Like at a Site We Took Over
When Chromium Guard took over security at one site, the outgoing arrangement had never included a handover audit at all, for either the security contract or the management one. Nobody had ever been required to hand over a current master key inventory. Key sets that were supposed to open restricted mechanical rooms didn't, and nobody could say with confidence who still held a working copy of what.
Nothing had gone wrong yet. That was the value of running the audit before something did. We flagged the gap, rekeyed the affected doors, and moved contractor access onto a logged system instead of a floating set of physical keys. Nobody involved had done anything wrong. It's that nothing in any prior agreement had ever required a handover review, so nobody ran one until we did.
That's the pattern behind every clause above. None of it is about catching a bad vendor. It's about not finding out what your agreement doesn't cover at the exact moment you need it to.
Before the Next Signature
None of these clauses cost anything meaningful to add to a contract. They cost a conversation with your current or prospective vendor before renewal, not after an incident makes the gap expensive. If your security agreement is up for review this quarter, pull it out and check each of these against what's actually written, not what you remember being told.