What Adequate Condo Records Means for an Ontario Condo Board

Every Ontario condo director has a records duty that is easy to underestimate. Section 55(1) of the Condominium Act, 1998 doesn't say "keep your records". It says the corporation "shall keep adequate records", and then lists what those records include. The word "adequate" is doing work, and owners know it: records are the single largest category of cases before the Condominium Authority Tribunal, 164 of the 341 cases it accepted in 2024-25 (CAO annual report).

What the law lists

Section 55(1) requires, among other things:

• the financial records of the corporation
• a minute book with minutes of owners' meetings and board meetings
• the declaration, by-laws and rules
• the records and documents the developer turned over at the first owners' meeting
• the performance audit report
• a record of all reserve fund studies and funding plans
• a copy of all agreements entered into by or on behalf of the corporation
• ballots and proxies, and any other prescribed records

O. Reg. 48/01, s. 13.1(1) prescribes more, including every warranty and guarantee the corporation receives about the property, all reports and opinions of an architect, engineer or other professional that relate to physical features of the property, all drawings and plans, records of additions, alterations and improvements to the common elements, and all insurance policies, current and expired.

Read that list with the building in mind. Contracts with the elevator and HVAC contractors, the invoices for their work, the engineering reports on the garage and the roof, the warranties on the new boiler: those are not optional paperwork. They are records the corporation is required to keep.

What "inadequate" means in practice

The Act doesn't define adequacy. The Condominium Authority of Ontario's records guidance gives the working test:

Records can be considered inadequate if they should exist but don't, are inaccurate or are incomplete.

The CAO adds that adequacy "is dependent on the type of record you are seeking and can be challenging to establish definitively," and gives examples. Inadequate: a corporation that says it doesn't keep minutes of its latest board meeting, when the Act says it must; audited financial statements missing a balance sheet and other required components. Not an adequacy issue: minutes that record a decision the owner disagrees with, or statements that lack detail beyond what the law requires.

An owner can take adequacy to the Tribunal if the issue happened within the last two years. For a board, the practical point is the first limb of the test: a record that should exist but doesn't is itself the problem. "We never wrote that down" is not a defence to an adequacy claim; it is the adequacy claim.

The limit that cuts the other way

Ontario's Auditor General looked at the Tribunal's first records cases and found that owners did not get part or all of the information they sought in 21 of 41 cases (51%) between November 2017 and March 2020, because in those cases the corporation was not required by law to maintain it, for example lists of staff or the support behind a board's approval of a contract renewal (Auditor General, 2020).

So the records duty has edges. Owners are entitled to records that exist and that the corporation is required to keep, not to explanations or to documents the corporation never had to create. That makes the list above more important, not less: where the law does require a record, its absence is exposure rather than an excuse.

Stored is not the same as producible

The most useful decision for boards on this point is Shoom v. York Region Standard Condominium Corporation No. 1090, 2022 ONCAT 145.

An owner asked for a year of records about cleanliness, security, repairs and water issues in the common elements. The corporation quoted $15,606.20 to produce them. The manager had built the estimate by timing herself on each task and multiplying: 1,095 daily security reports, each downloaded, printed, redacted and scanned one at a time, and a year of service requests and complaints sitting in email, filed either by owner or not at all, which she estimated at 365 hours to review in her own inbox and about as long again in the site administrator's.

The Tribunal allowed the per-report labour for the security logs. It did not allow the email estimate to stand. It pointed to O. Reg. 48/01, s. 13.2(2), which requires electronic records to be kept in a system "capable of reproducing any required information from the records in an accurate and intelligible form within a time that is reasonable," and found:

The fact that YRSCC 1090 is unable to produce a comparatively small number of records without physically reviewing thousands of emails is evidence that its email system does not comply with subsection 13.2(2) of the Regulation.

It cut that part of the fee roughly in half and split the cost between the parties, noting the owner could also have helped by narrowing his search.

The lesson for a board is precise. The corporation in Shoom had software. The problem was that its records were organised around people (email filed by owner, or not filed) when the request was organised around the building (repairs, water, cleanliness). A record has to be retrievable by the question someone is entitled to ask about it. For maintenance, that question is almost always about a piece of equipment or an area of the building.

How long to keep what

From s. 55(2) of the Act and s. 13.1(2) of O. Reg. 48/01:

| Record | Keep for | | --- | --- | | Financial records (including invoices) | At least 7 years from the end of the fiscal period | | Minutes, declaration, by-laws, rules | At all times | | Reserve fund studies and funding plans | At all times | | Agreements currently in force | At all times | | Expired agreements | 7 years after they expire | | Engineering and other professional reports on the property | At least 7 years from receipt | | Existing warranties and guarantees | At all times | | Expired warranties and guarantees | 7 years after they expire | | Drawings and plans | At all times | | Insurance policies in force / expired | At all times / 7 years after expiry |

If an owner requests a record while the corporation still holds it, the corporation must keep it at least until the request and any resulting Tribunal case are finished (s. 13.1(3)).

Why the maintenance record matters beyond the Tribunal

Adequate maintenance records also feed the reserve fund study. For a comprehensive study, or an update with a site inspection, the person doing the study must review "the repair and maintenance records and schedules in the custody or under the control of the corporation", along with warranties, guarantees and service contracts for each component (O. Reg. 48/01, s. 30(3)). A study built on a thin record has to assume more, and assumptions cost owners money in both directions: padded contributions, or a funding plan that misses a failure coming sooner than expected.

A board checklist

1. Can you produce every current contract for building systems, with its scope and term, in one place?
2. Can you produce the invoices for one piece of equipment over the last seven years without reading every invoice the building received?
3. Are engineering reports filed against the component they assess, not just by date?
4. Is every warranty on file with its expiry date, so it's used before it lapses?
5. If the manager changed tomorrow, would the record move with the building, or leave in someone's inbox?

A "no" to any of these isn't a breach on its own. It's where a records request, or a Tribunal case, will start.

This is general information about Ontario law, not legal advice. Whether a particular record is adequate is decided case by case. Boards facing a records dispute should speak to their condo lawyer.