Strata Law: April 2020

A good deal of strata strife comes from the top down, that is to say, from the legal profession down to hapless owners. Inherent conflicts of interest need to be recognized.
Judges too often administer statutes in favour of the convenience of legal professionals rather than the letter of the law and a just society.

One of the most common examples is automatically barring claims for relief 2 years after the misconduct, when that is not what the new Limitation Act says. What it actually says is:

Basic limitation period

6 (1) Subject to this Act, a court proceeding in respect of a claim must not be commenced more than 2 years after the day on which the claim is discovered. (The CRT's standard practice is to disregard the words "Subject to...")
Division 2 — Discovery of Claim

General discovery rules

8 Except for those special situations referred to in sections 9 to 11, a claim is discovered by a person on the first day on which the person knew or reasonably ought to have known all of the following:

(a) that injury, loss or damage had occurred;

(b) that the injury, loss or damage was caused by or contributed to by an act or omission;

(d) that, having regard to the nature of the injury, loss or damage, a court proceeding would be an appropriate means to seek to remedy the injury, loss or damage.

When it comes to recognizing who a person is, what they knew, and what is reasonable or appropriate, judges and members of BC's new Civil Resolution Tribunal seem to have a magical view of the rest of the world being just as wealthy and sophisticated as the members of the tribunal.

Judges and lawyers earning hundreds of dollars an hour may have enough disposable income to pay legal fees up to 50 times more than the minimum wage, but most people don't have that kind of money. An artificial "person" like strata corporations and insurance companies, or most elites in the top 20% of wealth are also in a reasonable position to make court proceeding an appropriate means to seek a remedy for claims of a correspondingly large nature. They all share a uniquely privileged position in society, which most others do not.

Legal professionals are not blind and stupid. For smaller amounts, or the other 80% of the population, lawyers and judges know, or ought to know, that high legal costs make it unreasonable to consider a court proceeding to be an appropriate means to seek a remedy, yet in an inherent conflict of interest they routinely cite, with very rare exceptions, a contrived 2-year limitation period to forever bar the less fortunate from equal protection before the law against those who profit from their own wrongs.

This willful blindness of legal professionals to what is appropriate I recognize as dirty deeds, done dirt cheap. It is a systemic travesty of justice that is unconscionable in a society with Canada's Charter of rights and freedoms.

With respect to integrity, or perverting justice to enrich legal professionals at the devastation of others, the following links sum up what is reasonable and appropriate in the eyes of the BC Law Society.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-woman-may-lose-home-over-huge-lawyer-bill-1.1291889