A strata can follow its parking bylaws fairly and still fall short of its obligation to give owners access to records. That was the result in Brown v. The Owners, Strata Plan BCS1245, 2026 BCCRT 1484, where the Civil Resolution Tribunal upheld a $200 visitor parking fine but ordered disclosure of correspondence between the strata council and its property manager. The decision also examined competing interpretations of which communications a strata corporation must keep and disclose.
Heidi and Jeremy Brown had visitors stay longer than their townhouse strata permitted without prior authorization. They acknowledged the underlying parking contravention but said the council hadn't followed the procedures for imposing a fine, had singled them out and had refused to provide requested records. The strata's letter gave them 14 days to respond and explained their right to request a hearing. The Browns responded at length and said they would ask for a hearing if the council decided to impose fines. The Tribunal treated this as a conditional, ambiguous indication rather than a clear request for a hearing before a decision. The council had received their full written explanation, so deciding before the entire response period elapsed wasn't a violation of section 135 of the Strata Property Act on these facts.
Evidence of warning letters and enforcement against other owners defeated the allegation of selective treatment. The council president's participation despite being the complainant likely raised a conflict issue under section 32, but there was no resulting prejudice because other councillors set a lower fine than he had recommended. The Tribunal also declined to invalidate a later parking bylaw. The required vote and land title filing had taken place, and the Act didn't require all the additional explanatory material the Browns wished the council had circulated. Internal council emails concerning a settlement offer were excluded from evidence as protected settlement material.
The records dispute produced a different outcome. Previous Tribunal decisions had disagreed about whether communications between council members and a professional strata manager counted as correspondence under section 35(2)(k). The Tribunal preferred the reasoning in Grajek over approaches that generally excluded those exchanges because a manager acts as the strata's agent. It ordered disclosure of all correspondence sent from Houghton Realty to the council during the specified period and communications sent by council members to the manager where the council had authorized or delegated the communication. Private or unauthorized exchanges between individual councillors weren't brought into the disclosure order merely because a manager was copied. Because the strata had missed its response deadline, it couldn't charge the ordinary copying fees for these documents.
The strata was ordered to produce the specified unredacted records without charge within 14 days and reimburse $112.50 of the Browns' Tribunal fees. The rest of their claims, including cancellation of the parking fine, failed. For strata councils, a valid enforcement decision doesn't excuse weak record handling. When a manager receives instructions or sends correspondence to council in the course of strata business, the safer approach is to preserve it and assess an owner's statutory disclosure request by its actual content and authority, rather than assume everything involving the manager is confidential.