Siblings feared losing their loading dock to a board-approved ramp

The situation

What Mathan and Kajan were actually afraid of was simple: losing the only way trucks could reach the loading dock behind their unit. The siblings co-owned a commercial condominium unit in Kitchener, leased to a medical clinic, worth somewhere in the range of $1.8 million, and the unit's value depended heavily on reliable vehicle access for deliveries and service calls. Both were experienced commercial landlords with other properties between them, which meant they understood, better than most owners would, how much a small change to shared space could affect a tenant's willingness to renew a lease.

The condominium board had approved a modification to the common element walkway connecting the building's main entrance to the parking area: a permanent accessibility ramp requested by Vincenzo, another unit owner whose tenant needed step-free access. On its face, the request was reasonable and the kind of accommodation condominium boards approve routinely. The trouble, from Mathan and Kajan's perspective, was where the ramp was planned to go. The design ran along the edge of the same corridor their delivery trucks used to reach the loading dock, narrowing the usable width enough that the siblings believed larger trucks would no longer be able to make the turn.

Mathan and Kajan had not been part of the board's approval process. They learned about the plan informally, through their property manager, weeks after the board had already signed off and after construction tendering had begun. Under the Condominium Act, a change to common elements of that kind is not supposed to happen on the board's say-so alone if it is substantial; a more formal process, involving notice to owners and, for a substantial change, a vote of owners holding at least two-thirds of the units, is meant to apply. Nobody had followed that process here.

By the time the siblings retained our office, they were not asking us to fight the accessibility ramp itself. They supported the goal. What they wanted was assurance that whatever got built would not cost them the loading dock access their lease, and their tenant's operations, depended on, and they were worried they had already missed their chance to say so.

What the documents showed

The Condominium Act, not the declaration, sets the notice and voting rules for changes to common elements, and those rules apply whatever the declaration says. A substantial alteration needs advance notice to owners and approval by owners of at least two-thirds of the units; a lesser change the board can make on its own, so long as it gives notice and respects the owners' right to requisition a meeting. The critical question was whether the ramp, as designed, fell into the lesser category the board had treated it as, or the substantial category the Act reserved for a different, more demanding process.

Reviewing the approved drawings against the declaration's site plan made the answer clear. The loading dock corridor was identified in the original declaration documents as an area of shared access specifically benefiting the siblings' unit, a detail that predated the current board and had likely been forgotten rather than deliberately overridden. The ramp design, as tendered, reduced the corridor's clear width below what the siblings' commercial lease represented to their tenant as available for delivery vehicles. That was not a cosmetic overlap; it was a change to the practical function of space the declaration treated as tied to their unit's use.

The deadline problem was real, but it was not the deadline the siblings first assumed. The Condominium Act gives owners a window after notice of a change to requisition a meeting and challenge a board's decision, and that window, measured from when notice should have gone out, had already passed by the time Mathan and Kajan learned about the plan informally. If that had been the only avenue available, the siblings would have had a much weaker position, arguing after the fact that they should be excused for missing a deadline they were never properly notified existed.

What the documents actually showed was a stronger avenue: because proper notice had never been given in the first place, the objection deadline had never validly started running against them. The board's approval itself was vulnerable to challenge on the basis that it had exceeded the authority it had under the Act for an alteration of this kind, independent of any deadline tied to notice the siblings never received.

What we did

1. Obtained the full board minutes and the tendered construction drawings for the ramp project, rather than relying on the informal description the siblings had received from the property manager. Going straight to the primary records was the right first move because a legal position built on secondhand description can collapse the moment someone produces the actual document, and reading the real drawings let us measure the corridor width ourselves and confirm the siblings' fear was grounded in fact rather than impression.
2. Cross-referenced the drawings against the declaration's original site plan, confirming that the loading dock corridor was expressly identified as shared access tied to the siblings' unit. This mattered because a complaint about inconvenience carries little weight with a board, while a corridor identified by name in the condominium's own founding document as tied to a specific unit produced a legal foothold the siblings' informal objection alone never could have.
3. Assessed whether the missed objection window actually barred a challenge, concluding that because the Act's notice requirement had not been followed for an affected owner, the deadline had never properly begun to run. This step was essential because the siblings had assumed the calendar had already defeated them, and confirming otherwise preserved their ability to raise the issue despite the nominal window having passed.
4. Wrote to the board formally, setting out the Act's notice and voting requirements for substantial alterations, the specific corridor width problem the drawings revealed, and the fact that proper notice to an affected owner had never gone out. Putting all three points in one formal letter, rather than raising them piecemeal, produced an immediate pause on construction tendering while the board took the review seriously.
5. Retained an accessibility consultant on the siblings' behalf to confirm what minimum ramp width and slope the accessibility requirements actually demanded. Bringing in independent technical expertise mattered because any alternative alignment we proposed had to genuinely satisfy the accessibility need, not merely relocate the problem, and the consultant's figures gave the redesign a defensible technical basis rather than a guess.
6. Proposed a practical alternative alignment for the ramp, developed with the consultant's input, that preserved the required step-free access while keeping the loading corridor at a width the siblings' delivery trucks could still use. Offering a workable fix rather than a bare objection produced a proposal the board and Vincenzo could adopt immediately instead of restarting the design process from nothing.
7. Attended a meeting with the board and Vincenzo's representative to walk through the analysis directly rather than continuing the exchange by letter. Explaining the legal and technical findings face to face, and answering questions in real time, moved the conversation away from a dispute over who was right and toward a design fix both sides could accept without further delay, defensiveness, or a further round of correspondence.
8. Confirmed the revised design and the board's authorization in writing before construction proceeded, rather than letting Mathan and Kajan rely on how the meeting had gone. Insisting on a documented sign-off produced a resolution recorded permanently in the board's own official minutes, so it could not later be forgotten, second-guessed, or quietly reopened once construction on the corrected alignment actually began the following month.

The outcome

Construction on the original design was paused before any work began, and the board approved the revised alignment once it understood the Act required a different process for an alteration of this scope. The accessibility ramp was still built, on essentially the same schedule Vincenzo had originally wanted, just shifted enough to leave the loading corridor at its full working width.

Mathan and Kajan's tenant never experienced any disruption to deliveries, because the problem never reached construction in the form that would have caused one. The prevention here was real: had the siblings not raised the issue when they did, the original design would likely have been built as tendered, and correcting a completed alteration to shared common elements after the fact would have been a far more expensive and contentious process than adjusting a drawing before ground was broken, potentially involving a formal owners' vote or a dispute over who bore the cost of tearing out and rebuilding.

The missed notice deadline could have ended the matter before it started, if the siblings had simply assumed the calendar controlled and not looked closely at whether notice had ever properly gone out to them in the first place. It was the Act's own notice requirement, not a sympathetic conversation with the board, that gave them a real footing to raise the issue in time despite that missed window.

The case closed with no litigation, no cost to the siblings beyond legal fees and a modest amount toward the consultant's design review, and a loading dock that still works the way their lease promised it would. Their tenant's lease renewed on schedule the following year, with the delivery access the clinic depended on never having been in question by the time the renewal came up.

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