When Does Strata Bylaw Enforcement Become Significantly Unfair?

Trevor Morley
Jul 17
8 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

WHEN DOES STRATA BYLAW ENFORCEMENT BECOME SIGNIFICANTLY UNFAIR?

Strata bylaw enforcement becomes significantly unfair, under section 164 of the Strata Property Act, when it is oppressive, burdensome, or unfairly prejudicial to an Owner — something more than mere prejudice or trifling unfairness (Reid v. Strata Plan LMS 2503, 2001 BCSC 1578, aff'd 2003 BCCA 126; Dollan v. The Owners, Strata Plan BCS 1589, 2012 BCCA 44, paras 26-27). Two recurring fact patterns account for most of these claims. The first is a Strata skipping the process the Act itself requires before it fines, charges, or restricts an Owner. The second is a Strata applying a bylaw to one Owner while letting a comparable Owner's identical conduct go unaddressed.

Both routes are assessed under the same test, and the Civil Resolution Tribunal applies it identically to a court, since its own significant-unfairness power under the Civil Resolution Tribunal Act mirrors section 164 directly.

This article sets out what that process actually requires, what happens when it is skipped, what makes enforcement selective rather than even-handed, and why most selective-enforcement claims still fail.

WHAT PROCESS MUST A STRATA FOLLOW BEFORE FINING OR RESTRICTING AN OWNER?

A Strata must satisfy five conjunctive requirements before it may fine an Owner, charge them the cost of remedying a contravention, or deny them access to a recreational facility (s.135). The steps are:

The Strata received a complaint about the contravention.
The Owner or tenant had a reasonable opportunity to answer the complaint, including a hearing if one was requested.
Where the person is a tenant, the tenant's landlord and the Owner were both notified.
A member of Council who was the subject of the complaint did not participate in the decision (s.136).
The Strata gave written notice of its decision as soon as feasible.

A missed step at any of these five bars the enforcement, and the most consequential of the five in practice is the second: whether the opportunity to answer was actually reasonable. Separately, an Owner or tenant has their own statutory right to request a hearing at a Council meeting on written application; once requested, Council must hold that hearing within four weeks and, where a decision is sought, give a written decision within one week after the hearing (s.34.1).

None of these five requirements is as rigid as it first sounds. A "complaint" does not need to come from a neighbour or another third party — a Strata Council can itself be the complainant that satisfies this requirement, since section 135 does not require a complaint from someone distinct from Council (David v. The Owners, Strata Plan VR 2588, 2023 BCSC 1358, para 81, adopting The Owners, Strata Plan VR19 v. Collins, 2004 BCSC 1743). A contravention is also established by the simple, objective fact of non-compliance with a bylaw's own terms — a fine for breaching a hard-surface-flooring bylaw does not depend on anyone actually complaining about the noise the bylaw was designed to prevent (David, para 80). And formal notice is not the only way to satisfy the complaint requirement: a long history of correspondence making clear what the fines related to has been found to give adequate notice under section 135, even without a single formal complaint letter (Terry v. The Owners, Strata Plan NW 309, 2016 BCSC 237, para 36).

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A STRATA SKIPS THAT PROCESS?

A Strata that enforces a bylaw without following section 135 or section 34.1 exposes itself to a significant-unfairness claim, and the Civil Resolution Tribunal has followed this reasoning repeatedly. A Strata that denied an Owner's hearing request and only offered to meet outside the four-week window the Act requires was found significantly unfair on that basis (Lozjanin v. The Owners, Strata Plan BCS 3577, 2019 BCCRT 481). A Strata that failed to schedule a requested hearing at all, despite more than ten separate requests over a year and a half, was found significantly unfair for the same reason (Hart v. The Owners, Strata Plan VR 172, 2023 BCCRT 529).

The consequence of skipping the process runs in both directions, however. Where a Strata's selective bylaw enforcement was significantly unfair, but the affected Owner also had an available hearing under section 135 and never requested it, a court has discounted the remedy to reflect the Owner's own failure to use the process available to them — a factor the court described as weighing heavily against the Owner, even though it did not defeat the underlying finding of significant unfairness (The Owners, Strata Plan LMS 3259 v. Sze Hang Holding Inc., 2016 BCSC 32, paras 258-259). An Owner who believes a fine or a bylaw contravention notice is wrong should request the hearing the Act gives them, not only because it may change the outcome, but because failing to request it can reduce what a court is later willing to award.

WHEN DOES A PROCEDURAL DEFAULT NOT RESULT IN THE FINES BEING DECLARED INVALID?

A procedural breach, on its own, does not automatically entitle anyone to a remedy. Procedural fairness requires a decision-maker to speak with one voice about the procedures it requires of a party, and not to enforce those procedures with greater vigour at a later stage than was originally represented — a principle the Supreme Court applied in reviewing how the Civil Resolution Tribunal handled a Strata's water-damage claim, expressly holding that it applies "regardless of whether the claim is concerned mainly with private property rights" (West v. The Owners, Strata Plan BCS 2637, 2021 BCSC 824, para 83). However, the same court declined to set the decision aside, because the breach it found caused no identifiable harm — the party was still able to raise its important points despite the procedural inconsistency, and a breach without shown prejudice does not warrant a remedy (West, para 85).

The Civil Resolution Tribunal has reached the same result on its own facts. A council hearing held without quorum and without a written decision afterward was found not significantly unfair, where the procedural breaches were not shown to have caused sufficient harm (Shayesteh-Fard v. The Owners, Strata Plan VR437, 2026 BCCRT 86). A three-month delay in providing records the Owner was entitled to was found not significantly unfair for the same reason, once the Owner recovered the documents through a further demand (Herchen v. The Owners, Strata Plan LMS 3380, 2026 BCCRT 649). The distinction that matters is whether the procedural slip actually cost the Owner something, not whether the Strata's paperwork was perfect.

WHAT MAKES BYLAW ENFORCEMENT DISCRIMINATORY OR SELECTIVE?

Bylaw enforcement is discriminatory when a Strata applies its own bylaw or policy to some Owners but not to others who are in the same position, without a disclosed and rational basis for the difference. A commercial Strata's council informally exempted various Owners from an "open for business" bylaw's fines — Owners who posted a "for sale" sign and hired a realtor, Owners who claimed their work took them elsewhere, Owners who agreed to let their unit be used for mall promotion — while continuing to fine the defendant Owners for the identical infraction, without ever telling Owners generally that these exemptions existed or on what basis they were granted. The court held this was significantly unfair, even though it accepted the council was not acting in bad faith: the council's discretion to grant exemptions is real, but an undisclosed, ill-defined, and excessively broad exercise of it defeats every Owner's reasonable expectation that the bylaw will be enforced consistently (Sze Hang Holding Inc., 2016 BCSC 32, paras 248-258).

Selective enforcement does not need to involve fines to be significantly unfair. A Strata had, as a matter of practice, allocated one exclusive-use parking stall to every commercial Owner whose unit was under 1,000 square feet — except one Owner, who was denied the same allocation for years despite owning several qualifying units. The court held that applying the Strata's own consistent policy to every similarly situated Owner but one was significantly unfair, and ordered the missing parking stalls allocated (B.P.Y.A. 1163 Holdings Ltd. v. The Owners, Strata Plan VR 2192, 2008 BCSC 695, paras 47-49). The Civil Resolution Tribunal has followed the same reasoning where the comparators are genuinely equivalent: a Strata that fined one Owner $50 for a parking violation while permitting other Owners and tradespeople to commit the identical breach was found to have applied a discriminatory double standard (Schultz v. The Owners, Strata Plan NW 2822, 2026 BCCRT 351), as was a Strata that investigated and fined one Owner for tree pruning while declining to investigate similar pruning by other Owners (Molyneux v. The Owners, Strata Plan EPS 5744, 2024 BCCRT 1100).

WHY DO MOST SELECTIVE-ENFORCEMENT CLAIMS FAIL?

A Strata does not have to remedy a trifling or trivial contravention of its own bylaws, and the same floor limits how much differential treatment an Owner can complain about. Where cooling equipment had sat, uncomplained-of, on limited common property for decades, the Court of Appeal held the contravention was trivial and the Strata had no duty to act on it — a council acting reasonably in the interests of all Owners can decide to ignore a trifling infraction without unfairly prejudicing anyone (Abdoh v. The Owners of Strata Plan KAS2003, 2014 BCCA 270, paras 22-23). A selective-enforcement claim needs a comparator whose conduct was genuinely the same as the complaining Owner's, and material harm from the difference — not just a general sense that someone else got away with something.

Our review of the Civil Resolution Tribunal's own published decisions bears this out: the tribunal has found bylaw enforcement significantly unfair in only about a third of the disputes where that question was actually decided on its merits, and selective-enforcement claims specifically fail more often than the average, because the comparators an Owner points to are rarely identical to their own situation. An Owner who built an unapproved shed pointed to neighbours' garden beds as comparable conduct the Strata had tolerated; the tribunal found the comparison did not hold, since a shed and a garden bed are not the same kind of alteration (Berezan v. The Owners, Strata Plan NW 9, 2019 BCCRT 438). An Owner fined $400 for a balcony-storage prohibition pointed to other Owners who were not fined for similar items; the tribunal again found the comparators were not exact enough to establish a double standard (1093870 B.C. Ltd. v. The Owners, Strata Plan NW213, 2022 BCCRT 328). A single Civil Resolution Tribunal decision is a data point, not a binding decision, but a large collection of them pointing the same way shows a direction for how these claims are actually decided — and that direction favours the Strata far more often than it favours the Owner.

CONSISTENT PROCESS AND CONSISTENT ENFORCEMENT PROTECT A STRATA FROM A SIGNIFICANT-UNFAIRNESS CLAIM

The law is about line drawing, and both threads in this article are really the same line seen from two directions: whether a Strata treated one Owner the way it treats, or would treat, everyone else. A Strata that follows section 135 and section 34.1 in substance, not just in form, and that applies its bylaws and policies on a transparent and consistent basis, is very unlikely to face a successful section 164 claim on either ground. A Strata that improvises its process, or that grants informal exceptions it never writes down, is exposed on both.

The key purpose of the law is for social ordering, and a robust and resilient Strata Community depends on Owners being able to predict how a bylaw will actually be enforced against them, before it is enforced. Our recommendation is that Council document its reasons whenever it declines to enforce a bylaw against one Owner, not only when it decides to enforce it against another — a documented, rational basis for treating two situations differently is what separates a defensible exercise of discretion from a significant-unfairness claim waiting to happen.