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The Condominium Authority Tribunal is Ontario’s online forum for a defined list of condo disputes, and it makes binding orders that both sides must follow. Two scheduled changes belong in front of every board: on 1 October 2026 the Tribunal moves to new Rules of Practice and a new online filing platform, and on 1 July 2027 owners’ meeting disputes join the list it can hear. Watching those dates, and producing the documents a case turns on, is ordinary work for whoever provides your condominium management services. Three questions decide what a board does next: is the dispute inside the list, what does a case cost, and what happens when a notice arrives.
What the Condominium Authority Tribunal Can Hear Right Now
The Tribunal’s authority is a list the government extends in phases, not a general power over condo disputes. So check your dispute against what the Tribunal can actually hear first. Most of what it will look at has to be recent, and for several dispute types that means roughly the last two years, so deal with a live problem while it is live.
Records Disputes
Records disputes cover the whole life of a request: a corporation that does not respond, a refusal of records the requester is entitled to, a fee that is too high, inadequate record keeping, and records not kept for the required period. The Tribunal opened in November 2017 with this category alone.
Pets, Animals, Vehicles, Parking and Storage
Since 1 October 2020 the Tribunal has heard disputes about the provisions in your governing documents on pets and animals, vehicles, parking and storage, and the indemnification tied to them. An owner can argue more than the facts: that the corporation enforced badly, that the rule is unreasonable, that governing documents contradict each other, or that the board failed to follow procedure when it made the provision. That last one is the one boards miss, because how a rule was passed is itself a live issue. Owners, mortgagees and corporations can file on parking and storage; a tenant cannot file directly.
Nuisance: Noise, Odour, Light, Vibration, Smoke and Vapour
Since 1 January 2022 the Tribunal has heard nuisance, annoyance and disruption disputes covering noise, odour, light, vibration, smoke and vapour, and the related indemnification provisions. This is the category most likely to reach a GTA board unannounced. A complaint the board used to settle with a phone call is now something an owner can file against the corporation. Knowing when a noise complaint is valid, and logging it the day it arrives, is what separates a defensible file from hearsay.
Settlement Agreements and Tied Chargebacks
Two smaller categories ride along with the main ones. The first is compliance with a settlement agreement from an earlier Tribunal case, filed within 6 months of the other side’s failure to comply. The second is chargebacks and liens, but only where they attach to an issue already inside the list. A chargeback on its own does not create jurisdiction.
What the Tribunal Cannot Hear, and What to Do About It
Getting the routing wrong is what actually costs a board money. Two errors do most of the damage: filing something the Tribunal cannot hear, and ignoring a notice because “that is not a Tribunal matter” was true the last time anyone checked.
What the Tribunal Will Turn Away
Several dispute types sit outside its reach:
- issues likely to cause damage to property or injury or illness
- agreements about modifications to the common elements, such as an electric vehicle charger
- condo governance and board decisions
- financial and budget disputes
- repair and maintenance disputes
- short-term rentals and infestation
Meeting-related issues such as quorum, voting and notices are outside it until 1 July 2027, when notice and requisition matters move inside while voting, proxies and ballots stay out.
What Happens to a Dispute the Tribunal Turns Away
For meeting issues, short-term rentals and infestation, three routes are named: mediation, arbitration, or a compliance order from the Superior Court of Justice. You may have to try mediation or arbitration first, so court is usually not the first stop.
Mandatory mediation and arbitration takes a different set: agreements with a developer, a management company or another corporation, first-year budget disputes with the developer, and common element alterations including an EV charger. That route has its own clocks: without an agreed mediator within 60 days the dispute may go to arbitration, and it generally moves there 30 days after the mediator reports that mediation failed.
Conduct complaints about a licensed condominium manager or management company go to the CMRAO rather than the Tribunal, because the CMRAO is a licensing regulator, not a dispute forum.
Four categories are different: the route depends on the dispute. Repair and maintenance sits outside the Tribunal, and who has to fix what is set by the Act and your declaration. Board decisions sit outside it too, which does not leave owners without options but does rule out a Tribunal application. So do budgets, common expense increases and special assessments, which means there is no low cost online route for a disagreement about the numbers. Anything likely to cause damage, injury or illness is outside it and is the one thing never to sit on: treat it as an urgent safety matter first, and get advice before filing anywhere.
Most of the time a board loses at the Tribunal, it lost before filing, by taking the dispute somewhere it could never be heard.
Where Your Dispute Actually Goes
| The Dispute | Where It Goes | The Detail That Matters |
| Records: access, adequacy, entitlement, retention | Condominium Authority Tribunal | In the list since the Tribunal opened in November 2017 |
| Pets and animals under the governing documents | Condominium Authority Tribunal | Added 1 October 2020 |
| Vehicles, parking and storage | Condominium Authority Tribunal | Added 1 October 2020; a tenant cannot file directly |
| Nuisance: noise, odour, light, vibration, smoke, vapour | Condominium Authority Tribunal | Added 1 January 2022 |
| A party ignoring a Tribunal settlement agreement | Condominium Authority Tribunal | File within 6 months of the failure to comply |
| A chargeback or lien tied to any of the above | Condominium Authority Tribunal | Only where the underlying issue is already in the list |
| AGM timing, meeting notice content, requisition costs | Condominium Authority Tribunal, from 1 July 2027 | A meeting issue until that date, so read the next row |
| Meeting issues today: quorum, voting, notices, how a meeting was run | Not the Tribunal. Mediation, arbitration, or a compliance order from the Superior Court of Justice | Voting, proxies and ballots stay outside after 1 July 2027 |
| Agreements with a developer, a management company or another corporation | Mandatory mediation and arbitration | Includes first-year budget disputes with the developer |
| Common element alterations, including an EV charger | Mandatory mediation and arbitration | Treated as an alteration dispute, not a Tribunal matter |
| Short-term rentals, and infestation | Not the Tribunal. Mediation, arbitration, or a compliance order from the Superior Court of Justice | Mediation or arbitration may have to come before court |
| Repair and maintenance | Outside the Tribunal. The route depends on the dispute | Who has to fix what is set by the Act and your declaration |
| Board decisions, budgets, common expense increases and special assessments | Outside the Tribunal. The route depends on the dispute | No low cost online route exists for a disagreement about the numbers |
| Anything likely to cause damage, injury or illness | Outside the Tribunal. The route depends on the dispute | Deal with it as an urgent safety matter first |
| Conduct of your licensed manager or management company | CMRAO | A licensing regulator, not a dispute forum |
What a Tribunal Case Costs and How Long It Takes
Start with the money, because boards routinely overestimate it. It costs $25 to file, $50 to move to mediation and $125 to move to a decision, so $200 takes a case all the way through, and none of it is refundable. The Condominium Authority of Ontario publishes the fee schedule and the costs rule together.
Representation is not required either, so a director or a manager can appear, and the whole file moves through the online dispute resolution system rather than a courtroom.
The Three Stages, and the Clock Inside Each One
Stage 1 is negotiation and carries no separate fee: parties exchange messages, documents and settlement offers in a shared online file, and an accepted offer closes the case with an automatic settlement agreement. There is no minimum or maximum length, but the case closes after 30 days of no activity, which cuts both ways. Stage 2 is mediation: the applicant pays $50, and a trained mediator clarifies the issues and tells each side what its position is worth. If mediation fails and the mediator gives permission to proceed, the applicant has 15 days to move to Stage 3 and pay $125, or the case closes. Stage 3 is an online hearing before a Tribunal Member.
How Long It Takes to Get a Decision
Decisions are typically issued within 30 days of the end of the hearing, and in 2024-25 the Tribunal hit that on 90% of decisions against a 90% target. Here is the number that should change board behaviour: nearly two-thirds of Tribunal cases resolve in negotiation or mediation, before anyone adjudicates. A board that treats Stage 1 as a formality on the way to a hearing has thrown away the cheapest exit it will be offered.
What Your Board Does the Day a Notice Arrives
The applicant delivers the Notice of Case, by mail or in person, to a board member, to the manager, or to the corporation’s registered address for service in the Condo Registry, then confirms delivery in the system. So the address on file matters, and the case moves to Stage 1 only once all parties have joined.
Join the Case Before the Date on the Notice
Joining is mechanical: log in to a CAO account or create one, then enter the invitation code and date exactly as they appear on the notice. The corporation can be represented by a board director, a CMRAO-licensed condominium manager, or a lawyer or paralegal. Whoever it is needs authority to act and enough knowledge of the issue to participate. Your notice carries the date you have to join by, and it is a deadline. If nobody from the corporation joins, the case does not pause, and the Tribunal can make an order without ever hearing from you.
What Your Board Should Be Able to Produce
The Tribunal decides on documents in a low-formality forum, which sounds forgiving and is not. Four things should be producible on demand. First, a dated trail: the complaint, the inspection, the letter, the reply, the follow-up, and the board minute recording the decision and its reason. Second, the provision you are enforcing, in the form the Act requires: a validly passed rule or by-law, not a policy or a notice taped up in the elevator. Third, evidence of consistent enforcement, because selective enforcement is a standard owner-side argument and a record answers it. Fourth, communication logs kept where they can still be produced months later. That comes from enforcing your rules and bylaws the same way every time.
Records Requests, and Where the Clock Starts Running
An informal ask does not start the legal timer. A request on the mandatory Request for Records form does, and the corporation then has 30 days to answer on the mandatory Board’s Response form. That response has to describe each record, whether it will be provided, why any record is refused, how access will be given, and any cost.
Delivery is just as mechanical: core records in electronic form go out with the response and are free, core paper records within 7 days after payment, non-core records within 30 days after payment, and the requester has 60 days to pay. Charges for paper and non-core records may run up to 20 cents per page plus reasonable delivery costs.
The Tribunal hears four kinds of records dispute: access, adequacy, entitlement and retention. An access case must be filed within 60 days of the board’s response, or no later than 6 months after the original request if the board did not respond. An adequacy case has to concern the last two years unless the Tribunal grants an extension. And if the Tribunal decides your corporation refused without a reasonable excuse, it can order the corporation to pay the owner a penalty on top of any costs.
Costs and Chargebacks: Where Boards Get Burned
Boards budget a case on the assumption that the loser pays the winner’s legal bill. That assumption is wrong twice over: once on what the Tribunal will order, and once on what the corporation may put on an owner’s ledger.
The Tribunal Rarely Orders Legal Fees
The general rule is that the Tribunal will not order one party to reimburse another’s legal fees. The exception is narrow: it may order all or part of a party’s costs, including costs tied to behaviour that was unreasonable, undertaken for an improper purpose, or that caused delay or additional expense. The $200 in Tribunal fees usually does follow the result where a Member makes a final decision and the case did not settle, while legal fees usually do not. The Tribunal publishes a practice direction on its approach to ordering costs, worth reading before you file.
Get the Order First, Then Touch the Ledger
Here is the catch. A corporation cannot charge compliance costs back to an owner without permission from the court or the Tribunal first, and that includes the legal fees for a lawyer’s compliance letter. What is allowed runs the other way: amounts the Tribunal has already ordered an owner to pay can be added to that owner’s common expenses. Order first, then the ledger.
The Act does let a corporation charge some costs without a fresh order:
- an owner who fails to do required repairs or maintenance
- damage caused by the owner, a tenant or a resident, capped at the repair cost or the insurance deductible, whichever is less
- breach of an occupancy by-law
- non-compliance with an agreement for a common element change
- damages and costs awarded in a legal proceeding
An unpaid valid chargeback gives the corporation a lien against the unit.
What a Decision Means, and What to Do If You Lose
A Member can order a party to do something, to stop doing something, to pay money to another party, to pay another party’s costs, to pay Tribunal fees, and to take any other action the Member considers fair. Decisions and consent orders are binding, and they are published free of charge in a public, searchable database, so a decision against your corporation is findable by any owner or buyer, while settlement agreements and most procedural orders are not. If a party breaches a settlement agreement rather than an order, the other side can file a new Tribunal case seeking enforcement.
Enforcing an Order
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice can enforce Tribunal decisions, and money enforcement runs through Small Claims Court for amounts up to $50,000 and the Superior Court above that. A case dismissed for a missed deadline may be refiled, and a withdrawn case can generally be refiled unless the Tribunal already ruled on the issues. A case dismissed on jurisdictional grounds should not be refiled without legal advice.
The 30 Day Appeal Window the Tribunal Cannot Extend
An appeal goes to the Divisional Court, and only on an error in applying the law or a legal principle, not because the board dislikes the result. The deadline is 30 days from the date of the decision, and the Tribunal has no power to extend it. Judicial review, for procedural concerns, also goes to the Divisional Court, where 30 days is treated as best practice. So the decision to appeal has to be made in the same month the decision lands, which means a board meeting rather than a conversation in the hallway.
Three Dates Every Ontario Board Should Put in the Calendar
Guidance written a few years ago is not merely dated here, it is wrong, because the list keeps moving on scheduled dates. Three of those dates change what a board does. The Condominium Authority of Ontario has set out the governance and Tribunal changes coming to Ontario condos and when each takes effect.
1 October 2026: New Rules and a New Filing Platform
On 1 October 2026 the Tribunal moves to new Rules of Practice and a new online case platform. Cases filed on or after that date use both, while open cases stay on the legacy system under their existing rules. The stated changes: more certainty around timelines when parties agree to move a case forward, streamlined notice delivery during intake, clarification around how costs are handled, and updated terminology. Unchanged: the three stages, filing procedures, document access, jurisdiction, and the parties’ rights and responsibilities. If you are filing or responding after that date, work from the current rules, not from what your last case taught you.
31 December 2026: New Requisition Rules
On 31 December 2026 the requirements for owner-requisitioned meetings change. The board-facing headline is a mandatory standardized requisition form, and a board response window that moves from 5 days to 20. Also new: further delivery methods including prepaid mail, courier, deposit in a mailbox and approved electronic delivery; a formal process for revising and withdrawing a requisition; a requirement that boards give their rationale when they refuse one; and 10 days for owners to revise it. The terminology shifts too, with “owner-occupied units” becoming “non-leased voting units”. The mechanics of owner-requisitioned meetings are worth knowing before one arrives.
1 July 2027: Meeting Disputes Move Inside, and the Ceiling Rises
On 1 July 2027 the exclusion list gets rewritten. The Tribunal gains jurisdiction over owners’ meeting disputes: whether an AGM is held each year, whether notice requirements and timelines were met, whether a notice contained the required content, and reimbursement of an owner’s reasonable costs of calling a meeting the corporation failed to call. What stays outside is just as specific: what happens during a meeting, including how votes were conducted, and proxy or ballot disputes, which keep today’s mediation and arbitration routing. On the same date the damages ceiling rises to $50,000, a higher ceiling than the Tribunal can order today. If money is the point of your dispute, check the current limit first.
Keeping Your Corporation Ready for the Tribunal, and Out of It
Almost everything that decides a Tribunal case is produced months before the notice arrives. Dated complaint logs. Rule enforcement issued in writing, in the same sequence every time. Records requests handled on the mandatory forms and on the clock. That is management work, not legal work, and it decides whether a case is defensible.
CPO Management has spent 15+ years managing GTA residential and commercial condominium corporations, and our CMRAO-licensed managers can represent a corporation in a Tribunal case. If you want that discipline running in the background, look at what a condo management company handles day to day.
If you are not sure your building’s records would stand up to a Tribunal application, talk to our team before one arrives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Records, pets and animals, vehicles, parking and storage, nuisance including noise and odour, compliance with a Tribunal settlement agreement, and chargebacks or liens tied to one of those. The government sets the list.
$25 to file, $50 for mediation and $125 for a decision, so $200 all the way through, none of it refundable. Stage 1 closes after 30 days of no activity, the applicant has 15 days to advance from mediation, and decisions typically arrive within 30 days of the hearing.
Three dates. On 1 October 2026 the Tribunal moves to new rules and a new online filing platform. On 31 December 2026 the requisition rules change, including a mandatory form and a 20 day board response window. On 1 July 2027 owners’ meeting disputes join its jurisdiction and the damages ceiling rises to $50,000.
Generally no. The Tribunal will not usually order one party to pay another’s legal fees, though it may where conduct was unreasonable, for an improper purpose, or caused delay or expense. Tribunal fees usually follow the result.
No. A board director, a CMRAO-licensed condominium manager, or a lawyer or paralegal may represent the corporation. The representative needs authority to act and real knowledge of the issue.
The case proceeds without you, and the Tribunal can make an order without your input. Joining is not optional, and the date you have to join by is on the notice.
Not on your own initiative. A corporation needs permission from the court or the Tribunal before charging compliance costs to an owner, including a lawyer’s compliance letter. Once the Tribunal has ordered payment, that amount can go on the owner’s common expenses.
