At our last annual general meeting, one of the candidates for the board withdrew his nomination and transferred all of his votes to another candidate who was then elected. Was this legal?
No. If proxy forms completed by owners instructed their proxies to vote for a candidate, that candidate could not instruct the proxies to cast their votes for someone else. Owners attending the meeting can vote for any candidate. But the candidate for whom they voted could not instruct the scrutineers that votes for him are to be treated as votes for anyone else.
The property manager is asking me to provide a copy of my lease agreement with my tenant. I think this is a private matter. Is there any legal reason that I have to comply?
Section 83 of the Condominium Act provides that within 30 days of leasing the owner’s unit, the owner must notify the corporation that it is leased. The owner must also provide the corporation with the lessee’s name, the owner’s address and a copy of the lease or the prescribed summary form of lease. The lessee must, in turn, be provided with copies of the declaration, bylaws and rules of the corporation.
I am on the board of our condominium and the directors would like to replace our property manager. Can the board vote for removal of the management company or must there be a vote of the owners?
You must first examine the management agreement and if it provides that the corporation may terminate the employment of the manager without cause by giving certain notice of termination, the board may vote to give the required notice and a vote of the owners would not be required.
If the agreement states that the management services will be provided for a certain term and there is no provision permitting the corporation to terminate before the end of that term, termination may be impossible — short of a fundamental breach of the management agreement.
The board in my condominium recently passed a rule stipulating that a unit could not be leased for a term shorter than one year. There was no minimum before, and I have been leasing it for a number of years for terms of not less than four months. Can my rentals be grandfathered?
The rule could provide for grandfathering, i.e., state that the rule does not apply, for example, to any lease of a unit owned by a person prior to a certain date. There is no obligation for a board to include a grandfathering provision and the failure to do so would not appear to render the rule unreasonable and thus unenforceable.