Selective enforcement: the accusation, and the record that answers it

Why the accusation is so effective

A board enforcing its rules holds the high ground: the Condominium Act, 1998 binds every owner and occupier to the declaration, by-laws and rules, and section 17(3) puts a duty on the corporation to take reasonable steps to ensure compliance. The selective-enforcement accusation is powerful precisely because it does not contest any of that. It concedes the rule and attacks the referee. The moment an owner produces photos of three other balconies with the same barbecue and no letters, the dispute is no longer about barbecues. It is about whether the corporation applies its rules honestly, and the board is suddenly the party with something to explain.

It also resonates beyond the hearing. Accusations of targeting travel fast through a building, harden into “the board plays favourites,” and surface at the next AGM. Even when unfair, the perception costs the board the benefit of the doubt on everything else it does.

What it does to your case

In a written CAT hearing, a Tribunal member weighing a compliance dispute reads the corporation’s conduct alongside the owner’s. Evidence of uneven enforcement can undercut the corporation’s position in several ways: it invites the inference that the rule is not consistently treated as important; it recasts reasonable enforcement steps as a campaign against one person; and where enforcement has been long dormant, it raises the question of whether the corporation can fairly revive the rule against one owner without warning everyone first. None of this makes the rule unenforceable, but all of it makes the board’s road longer, and disputes that should have settled at Stage 1 instead grind on, with costs the corporation may not recover.

The defence is a record, not a rebuttal

When the accusation comes, an indignant paragraph about the board’s good faith proves nothing. What answers it is a log a stranger can read:

• Every instance of the violation the board observed or received a complaint about, dated, across all units, not just the one in dispute.
• The same escalation ladder applied each time: same first letter, same response window, same follow-up, with delivery recorded.
• Where outcomes differed, a minuted reason. An owner who complied after the first letter is not evidence of favouritism; it is evidence the process works. A documented accommodation under the Human Rights Code is not an exception to uniformity; it is uniformity, applied to different facts. The minute is what makes that visible.

A board that can produce that log has converted “you’re targeting me” from an argument into a factual claim that its own records disprove. A board that cannot is left asserting its fairness, and assertions without documents are just claims.

Building uniformity into the routine

• Log every instance, including the awkward ones. The director’s friend’s unit gets logged like any other. A log with visible holes where the well-connected units should be is worse than no log, because it documents the favouritism.
• One ladder, written down. Decide the escalation steps once, as a board, and minute them: what triggers a first letter, how long the response window runs, what escalation looks like. Then follow the ladder every time. Discretion lives in the written exceptions, not in whether the process starts.
• Sweep, don’t snipe. If a rule has gone unenforced for a season, restart with a building-wide notice that enforcement resumes on a stated date, then enforce evenly from that date. Reviving a dormant rule against exactly one owner is how boards manufacture the accusation against themselves.
• Keep complaints in the same file. Enforcement that responds to complaints is easier to defend when the complaint is in the record, because it shows why this unit, this month.

If the accusation has already been made

Resist the urge to argue in prose. Pull the enforcement history for that rule across the whole community and look at it the way a Tribunal member would. If it is genuinely uniform, produce it, without editorializing, as part of a CAT-ready evidence package. If it is not uniform, the honest move is to fix the process prospectively: minute the gap, issue the building-wide reset notice, and restart evenly. Boards get little credit for pretending the record is better than it is, and a corrected process documented from today reads far better than a defended double standard.

Either way, the lesson is the same one that runs through every condo dispute: the record either accumulated as things happened or it does not exist. Uniformity is cheap to keep and nearly impossible to reconstruct.