The Records Request a Missing Minute Book Almost Defeated

The situation

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, forwarded by the property manager with no covering note. It was addressed to Katalin from the condominium corporation's board, and it stated that her recent conduct toward the board, specifically her repeated requests for financial and meeting records, was being treated as harassment under the corporation's code of conduct. It gave her two weeks to respond before the matter went to the tribunal that handles condominium disputes in Ontario.

Katalin worked as an air traffic controller, a job that ran on strict documentation, checklists and a low tolerance for ambiguity. She had bought her unit in Morrisburg two years earlier with her partner Erzsebet, who also worked as an air traffic controller at the same facility. The two of them had pooled a substantial down payment, and the unit represented a large share of what they had built together.

Katalin and Erzsebet had chosen the building in Morrisburg partly because it was small, quiet, and self-managed enough that they expected to know most of what was happening in it. That assumption made the special assessment feel especially jarring when it appeared with no explanation attached.

Katalin's requests had started six months earlier, after she noticed a special assessment on her monthly statement that had not been mentioned at any meeting she had attended. She asked the property manager, a man named Willem, for the minutes of the meeting where the assessment was approved, along with the reserve fund study that was supposed to justify it. Willem told her the records would be sent along shortly. They were not. She asked again a month later, then again after that, each time in writing and each time politely.

By the time the harassment letter arrived, Katalin had sent four written requests over five months without receiving a single document in response. She had not raised her voice, attended in person uninvited, or contacted board members individually outside of the property manager. She was, by her own account and by the tone of her emails, simply asking for what she believed she was entitled to see. The letter accusing her of harassment felt, to her, like an attempt to make the requests themselves the problem instead of the missing records. She brought the letter to us the same week it arrived, worried less about the tribunal deadline itself than about what a formal harassment finding might mean for how the board and her neighbours would treat her afterward, in a building she planned to live in for years.

Why this was harder than it looked

The first difficulty was practical rather than legal. When we asked the property manager's office for a complete set of the records Katalin had requested, in preparation for defending her at the tribunal, the response was that a portion of the file could not be located. The meeting at which the special assessment was approved had, it turned out, never been properly minuted. A draft existed on a former board member's computer, but it had never been finalized or circulated, and the reserve fund study referenced in that draft could not be found at all.

This put the corporation, not Katalin, in a difficult position, but it also complicated her defence. To show the tribunal that her requests were reasonable and that the corporation's failure to respond was the actual problem, we needed to establish what records should have existed and what the corporation had actually done with the assessment. Without the minutes or the study, that meant piecing together a picture from secondary sources: bank statements showing when the assessment funds were collected, invoices from the contractor who did the work the assessment paid for, and email threads between board members that had not been part of any formal record but that touched on the decision.

The second difficulty was the amount at stake once the picture came into focus. The special assessment itself, combined with related reserve fund contributions across the ownership, put the underlying financial dispute in a range between roughly three hundred fifty thousand and eight hundred thousand dollars once the full scope of the building's deferred maintenance came into view. Katalin's individual complaint was a small piece of a much larger problem: a corporation that had been approving significant expenditures without keeping the records the law requires it to keep, exposing every owner, not just Katalin, to a governance failure much larger than one harassment letter.

The third difficulty was Erzsebet's position. As Katalin's partner and co-owner, Erzsebet had also signed some of the early requests jointly, which meant the corporation's letter, though addressed only to Katalin, implicated the household's standing with the board more broadly. Erzsebet's own working relationship with Katalin at the same facility meant that any protracted dispute with the board carried a personal cost beyond the paperwork, since the two of them discussed little else at home for weeks after the letter arrived. There was also a scheduling reality neither of them could ignore: their shift rotation at the facility left them limited windows to attend meetings, review documents, or meet with us, which meant every step in responding to the board had to work around a calendar that was largely out of their control.

What we did

1. Confirmed Katalin's underlying entitlement to the records before addressing the harassment allegation. Owners in a condominium corporation have a right to examine specified categories of records, including minutes and reserve fund studies, on request. We set out that entitlement clearly in writing so the tribunal process would start from the correct legal footing rather than from the corporation's framing of the dispute.
2. Requested the complete record file directly from the property manager's office. Rather than relying only on what had already been provided, we sent a formal request for every document responsive to Katalin's original requests, which is what first surfaced that the meeting minutes and reserve fund study did not exist in finished form. That gap was the fact the harassment letter had never accounted for, and it reframed the dispute before we answered a single allegation.
3. Reconstructed the missing meeting record from secondary sources. We gathered the unfinalized draft minutes, bank records showing collection of the assessment, and the contractor invoices tied to the work it funded, and organized them into a timeline that established what had actually been decided and when, even without a formal minute to point to. That timeline became the factual backbone the tribunal submission would have rested on had the matter not resolved by correspondence first.
4. Documented the pattern of Katalin's requests and the corporation's non-response. We assembled all four written requests alongside the dates the corporation ought to have responded, showing a consistent, moderate tone on Katalin's side against a consistent pattern of delay on the corporation's, which directly undercut the characterization of her conduct as harassment. That side-by-side record was easy for the board to check against its own file and hard for it to dispute once it was set out plainly.
5. Prepared a response to the harassment letter before the tribunal deadline. We wrote back to the board explaining that repeated, polite requests for records an owner is entitled to see do not constitute harassment under any reasonable reading of a code of conduct, and that the appropriate remedy for the underlying dispute was production of the records, not disciplinary action against the person asking for them.
6. Flagged the record-keeping failure as a corporation-wide issue, not just Katalin's problem. We noted in our correspondence that the missing minutes and study likely affected every owner's ability to understand the special assessment, which shifted the framing of the dispute from one difficult owner to a governance gap the board needed to fix regardless of Katalin's complaint, and gave the board a reason of its own to resolve the matter quickly.
7. Tracked the tribunal's filing timeline closely so Katalin was never caught without a response ready. Because the harassment letter had given a firm deadline, we built our own internal timeline working backward from it, ensuring every document and submission was ready well before the corporation could argue Katalin had ignored the process or missed a step of her own, a claim that would have compounded rather than resolved the dispute.
8. Coordinated everything around Katalin and Erzsebet's shift schedule rather than a standard business-hours process. Because their working hours as air traffic controllers left narrow windows for calls and document review, we scheduled check-ins around their rotation and confirmed each step in writing so nothing depended on catching either of them at a specific time of day, and so a missed call never became a missed deadline.

The outcome

Faced with a documented pattern of reasonable requests, a demonstrated gap in its own record-keeping, and the prospect of that gap being aired at the tribunal, the board withdrew the harassment allegation before the filing deadline passed. It came with a written acknowledgment that Katalin's requests had been appropriate and that the delay in responding had been the corporation's failing, not hers.

Katalin did not need to file a tribunal application at all in the end; the matter was resolved through correspondence once the corporation understood the position it would be defending. She did concede, in the interest of closing the matter quickly, not to pursue a separate complaint about the delay itself, focusing instead on securing the records and clearing the harassment allegation from any record the board might keep. The reserve fund study was eventually located in an earlier, unfinished form and shared with her, along with a commitment from the board to formally minute the original assessment decision retroactively.

The dispute never reached the tribunal, and Katalin's standing with the corporation was never formally damaged by the allegation. What could have become a contested hearing, and a permanent mark against her in the corporation's files, instead closed within a few months as a correspondence matter. Erzsebet, who had shared the stress of the letter from the start, was relieved that the household's relationship with the board did not carry into their next annual meeting as an open conflict.

The larger governance gap the dispute exposed did not disappear along with the allegation. The corporation still had to account for a special assessment approved without a finished record, and other owners in the building were, in principle, entitled to ask the same questions Katalin had. She chose not to pursue that wider issue herself once her own name was cleared, deciding that raising it further was a fight for the board and the ownership as a whole rather than one she needed to carry alone.

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