The Civil Resolution Tribunal is a Compass Not a Map

WHY CAN'T YOU TREAT A SINGLE CRT DECISION AS THE LAW?

A single Civil Resolution Tribunal decision cannot be treated as the law, because the Civil Resolution Tribunal Act was never built to produce precedent. I have had an uncounted number of conversations that start the same way: someone sends me a CRT decision, on facts they say are just like theirs, and asks if they have to do what the CRT said in that decision. It is a reasonable question to ask, and here is my usual response: one decision, on its own, does not tell you what the law requires. It can be very useful in trying to decide what to do for your Strata Corporation but it does not restrict your freedom to do make the best decision for your strata community in your particular situation. Of course, this answer depends on their actually being an opportunity for discretion, several aspects of the Strata Property Act are direct in what a Strata Corporation must do or cannot do.

We have written about the logical fallacy of treating precedent as though it locks in a future outcome in another article, and the Civil Resolution Tribunal is the clearest example of why that fallacy is so tempting. The tribunal produces a steady stream of readable, plain-language decisions on exactly the disputes that Owners and Councils actually have. That readability is precisely what makes a single decision feel like an answer, when it is closer to one data point.

WHAT DOES THE CIVIL RESOLUTION TRIBUNAL ACT SAY ABOUT PRECEDENT?

The Civil Resolution Tribunal Act is built around resolving the dispute in front of the tribunal, not building a body of binding authority for the next one. The tribunal's mandate is to provide dispute resolution services that are "accessible, speedy, economical, informal and flexible" and that "applies principles of law and fairness" (s.2(2)), and its role, once agreement fails, is simply "to resolve the dispute by deciding the claims brought to the tribunal by the parties" (s.2(3)(b)). Nothing in that mandate asks a tribunal member to follow, distinguish, or reconcile earlier decisions the way a court is expected to.

The Act's own structure confirms this. Where a claim raises an issue "of such importance that the claim or dispute would benefit from being adjudicated by that court to establish a precedent," that is a listed reason for a court, not the tribunal, to take the claim (s.16.3(a)). The legislature drew the line itself: precedent-setting is a court function that moves a dispute out of the jurisdiction of the CRT. This only makes sense if the tribunal is not capable of setting precedent. The BC Supreme Court has applied exactly this reasoning, keeping a claim out of the tribunal in part because it involved "multiple areas where the strata corporation asked the Court to make new law" (The Owners, Strata Plan VIS 1210 v. Ngai Estate, 2024 BCSC 2232, paras 42, 47-49).

WHY IS A CRT DECISION REACHED WITHOUT THE BENEFIT OF LEGAL ARGUMENT?

A CRT decision is usually reached without a lawyer testing either side's position, because the Act's default is self-representation. Unless a party is a child, a person with impaired capacity, or the tribunal or the rules otherwise permit it, "the parties are to represent themselves in a tribunal proceeding" (s.20(1)). That is a deliberate part of the tribunal's design, not an oversight; the Court of Appeal has described the resulting process as "the inevitable result of legislation that diverts disputes...into a tribunal that is not required to afford the litigants a traditional hearing," reflecting the legislature's own balance of efficiency against formality (Downing v. Strata Plan VR2356, 2023 BCCA 100, para 65):

[65]      What might initially strike an observer to be procedural unfairness in this case is the inevitable result of legislation that diverts disputes—some of which are large in terms of money and of vital concern to residents of condominiums—into a tribunal that is not required to afford the litigants a traditional hearing, even where there are credibility questions. The impression that the process is unfair is reinforced by the statutory limitation on the scope of appellate review of the tribunal decisions. But the decision to move disputes involving strata corporations into this dispute resolution process is a policy decision of the legislature, and reflects the legislature’s balancing of the competing claims of efficiency and fairness.[emphasis added]

For people that rely on the CRT to resolve conflicts, the prioritization of efficiency over fairness can seem like a critical flaw. However, it is important to be clear about what that means in practice. A decision written after two self-represented parties each explained their side, with no one testing whether the tribunal member identified the right test, applied it correctly, or was even shown the governing authority, is not the same kind of document as a reasoned judgment. Our experience is that CRT reasons can be excellent, but they can also miss a binding line of authority entirely, simply because it was not raised.

WHY DOES A SINGLE DECISION FEEL SO PERSUASIVE ANYWAY?

A single decision feels persuasive because it is concrete, it is recent, and it resembles your own situation in the details that happen to catch your eye. That is exactly the shape of the precedent fallacy: assuming that because a decision was made on one set of facts, the same decision must follow on a similar set. The role of a lawyer, when there is precedent, is to test how similar "similar" really is. That is not required with a decision of the Civil Resolution Tribunal, because even if the situation is completely analogous there is no precedent.

This is not an argument that a CRT decision is worthless. It is an argument that a single CRT decision, read in isolation, is the wrong unit of analysis. Strata Corporation's should not believe that they have lost the ability to implement a decision that is best for that community only because a CRT decision stated that a different Strata Corporation could or could not have implemented the same thing.

WHY DOES A COLLECTION OF DECISIONS TELL YOU SOMETHING ONE CANNOT?

Quantity has a quality all its own. One tribunal member's reasoning on one afternoon can be idiosyncratic, incomplete, or simply wrong, but the same tribunal member's reasoning is far less likely to be an outlier when twenty other members, on twenty other files, keep landing in the same place on the same narrow question. A single CRT decision is a data point; a cluster of them, gathered around one specific issue and read together, is a pattern. Patterns are informative even when no individual point in them can be relied upon.

This is the sense in which the Civil Resolution Tribunal functions as a compass rather than a map. A map claims to show you the actual road, turn by turn, and a single CRT decision cannot make that claim for you, because nothing obliges the next tribunal member to take the same road again. A compass makes a smaller, more honest claim: it tells you which direction the terrain generally runs, based on everything gathered about it so far, and lets you plan around that. Read enough CRT decisions on the same recurring question, and a direction of travel emerges, whether the tribunal has tended to treat a certain kind of delay as significantly unfair, or a certain kind of chargeback as unauthorized, even though the tribunal itself is not bound to keep pointing that way tomorrow.

HOW DOES MORLEY HANSON USE CRT TRENDS WHEN ADVISING A STRATA?

Our practice is to keep those two things separate rather than letting one quietly stand in for the other. When we advise on a question that the Civil Resolution Tribunal regularly decides, we give a Strata two distinct statements: first, what the law actually requires, grounded in the Strata Property Act and binding court authority; and second, a candid estimate, based on the pattern across the tribunal's recent decisions, of what the Civil Resolution Tribunal itself would likely decide if a dispute is started. We call the second one our guestimate, deliberately, so that no one mistakes it for a legal opinion.

The distinction matters because the two answers do not always match. Binding authority may point one way while the tribunal's own practice, for reasons that are not always fully articulated, tends to point another. Where they diverge, we say so, because that divergence is itself useful information: it can affect how a Strata Corporation describes or implements a solution and how it can be prepared to respond if a dispute is started with the Civil Resolution Tribunal.

A CRT DECISION IS A COMPASS, NOT A MAP, AND SHOULD USED THAT WAY

A single Civil Resolution Tribunal decision is not the law, and it was never designed to be. The Act routes precedent-setting to the courts, builds the tribunal's process around self-represented parties resolving their own dispute rather than testing legal argument, and gives no tribunal member any obligation to follow another's reasoning. Treating one CRT decision as though it settles a different dispute is the same fallacy as treating one court decision as an unbreakable precedent, except with even less to support the analogy.

None of that makes the Civil Resolution Tribunal's decisions unimportant. Read in volume, on a specific recurring question, they show a direction of travel that a robust and resilient Strata Community can genuinely use to anticipate what is likely to happen, even while understanding that the tribunal remains free to go a different way next time. A compass is still worth carrying. You simply have to know that it is a compass, and not a map.