The owners in a townhouse complex in Peel Region gives the board a requisition for a special meeting to remove four members of their five-member board.

The owners were given notice of a special assessment to fix missing fire stops between their townhouse units. The unit owners believed that the assessment was excessive because some of the work was already done and they suspected that the costs were artificially inflated.

They were also upset because their reserve funds were exhausted by the board and the property manager going on a two-year long spending spree granting contracts for work that many owners thought were unnecessary.

Partly in protest and partly because the owners thought that the assessment should be lowered, a number of owners did not make their first payment. Once they learnt that they had to pay the assessment in order to be able to vote, the owners made arrangements to pay up.

It was obvious that the owners would easily get the required 50% plus one vote required to remove the board. The board set the date for the special meeting 35 days after the first assessment payment was due.

The property management company worked hard with the board to defeat the requisition by a combination of threats, buying votes, intimidation and denying the owners their right to vote.

Their tactics included:

1.	Telling a woman that if she did not give the board her proxy they would make her get rid of four of her five cats.
2.	Telling several owners that the board would make them get rid of their basement tenants if they did not give the board their votes.
3.	Replacing windows in three units with upgraded ones. The other owners were sure this was payment for signed proxies.
4.	All owners in arrears could vote only if they gave a certified cheque or money order for their arrears prior to the start of the meeting. Regular cheques or cash was not accepted even three days before the meeting.
5.	Owners paying by direct deposit did not have their special assessment deducted from their accounts as they were told would automatically happen. So they were in arrears and could not vote.
6.	The property manager "lost / misplaced" some of the cheques so the owners were in arrears for over 30 days so they could not vote.
7.	Some owners wrote their cheques in the property management company's name rather in the condo corporation's name. Instead of them being told they made an error, they were told they were in arrears.
8.	Some owners paid up at the property management main office but were denied ballots because they did not have a receipt as proof of payment.
9.	One unit owner was charged more than $500 for moving her fence back by two feet. To this date, requests for reason behind this charge have gone unanswered.
10.	One owner was denied a ballot because the property manager said she had filled in a proxy. She did not but was still denied her right to vote.
11.	Another unit owner, in the presence of the corporation lawyer, the board and the property manager, asked everyone at the meeting if anyone had her proxy. Although no one responded, the property manager would not allow her to vote.
12.	The ballots that were issued had the owner's unit numbers written on them so the board and property manager would know how the owners voted.

At the meeting, the four directors facing the recall vote, were supported by only four ballots. Every other owner who showed up voted against them. Unfortunately, the owners did not have the required 50% plus one needed to win the recall vote.

The voting results

Ballots for directors	4
Proxies in favour of directors	74
Proxies rejected	00
Ballots against the directors	57
Proxies against the directors	55
Number of their proxies rejected	42

After the owners were defeated at the meeting, the property management company sent a letter to all the owners thanking them for the confidence they showed in their hard-working board.

Since the group representing the owners cannot raise the thousands of dollars required to take the corporation to court for election fraud, they were attempting to force a second requisition meeting.

Once the board got wind that the owners were planning a second requisition, the activists got a letter from the corporation's lawyer saying that they would not allow a requisition meeting to be held and the board is prepared to go to court to get an injunction to prevent the meeting. He also said that that the activists may be required to pay the condo's legal fees.

That letter stopped the activists from making a second attempt.


top  contents  chapter  previous  next