We’ve been telling readers we were going to start a monthly digest of BC Civil Resolution Tribunal decisions affecting strata corporations. This is the format-introducing piece — issue zero. The first real issue lands at the end of June.

If you’re already familiar with the CRT and just want to know how to use it yourself, our how to read CRT decisions article is the deeper read.

Why a digest

The CRT publishes hundreds of strata-property decisions a year, every one of them online and free to read. Almost no BC council member reads them.

The reason isn’t laziness. There are too many; most are 10–30 pages; the format is dense; and only a fraction of any given month’s decisions are pedagogically useful to anyone outside the parties. A council member who tried to read every CRT strata decision would spend half their evenings doing it and still miss the patterns.

What helps is curation. Of the decisions in any given month, three to six tend to be worth reading — usually because they clarify a recurring grey area, push back on a common bylaw drafting pattern, or close off a procedural argument that’s been working in practice but shouldn’t have been. Those are the decisions we’ll cover.

The format for each issue

Each monthly issue will follow the same structure. Roughly 800–1,200 words across three to four decisions.

For each decision we cover:

• Citation and parties. The CanLII citation (e.g. “2026 BCCRT 123”), the case name, and the date decided. Both linkable so you can read the full decision.
• What was at stake. One paragraph of plain-English facts — the kind of dispute, the dollar amount or relief sought, the procedural posture.
• What the Tribunal decided. The ratio in two or three sentences. Where the reasoning hinged on a specific SPA section or bylaw, we cite it.
• What it means for councils. This is the part most other CRT coverage skips. What should a council operating today read into the decision? What’s the practical change in how the dispute would be handled going forward?
• What it doesn’t mean. Because CRT decisions aren’t binding precedent in the appellate sense, councils sometimes over-read them. Where there are obvious limits to how the decision transfers, we say so.

We don’t cover every notable decision — only the ones that change how a council would actually behave or where a council was clearly on the wrong side of the analysis and other councils risk repeating it.

What we’re reading for

The categories of decision we expect to come back to most:

Bylaw enforcement procedure. A large share of CRT strata decisions turn not on the substance of the bylaw but on whether the strata followed the SPA s. 135 procedure (written complaint, owner opportunity to respond, council decision, notice of decision). Procedural failures are the most consistent reason fines and penalties get reversed.

Repair responsibility allocation. Our repair responsibility calculator is built on the default SPA allocation. CRT decisions repeatedly test the edges of that allocation — in-suite plumbing past the shut-off, balcony membrane vs. surface, parking-stall finish vs. structure. We’ll cover the decisions that move the line.

Document access requests. SPA s. 35 sets out what records owners are entitled to and on what timeline. Stratas frequently get the response window wrong, get the redactions wrong, or treat the request as discretionary when it isn’t. The CRT has been steadily tightening expectations.

AGM and SGM procedural disputes. Quorum, voting, proxy, notice. Our AGM vote calculator is grounded in the SPA defaults; CRT decisions occasionally clarify how those defaults apply in unusual situations. Worth flagging when they do.

Insurance and deductible allocation. The standard insurance bylaw allocates the strata’s deductible to the responsible owner where a loss is traceable to one. The CRT decides a steady stream of these. The patterns matter for how council writes its bylaws.

Bylaw drafting under recent CRT pressure. Some bylaw clauses that were standard ten years ago have been quietly chipped away at — short-term-rental enforcement, fines escalation rules, certain pet restrictions, certain age-related rules. We flag when a decision suggests a clause stratas are using is becoming unenforceable.

What we won’t cover

The decisions we’ll generally skip:

• Fact-specific disputes between owners with no broader implication (a neighbour-noise complaint that turns on whose audio recordings the Tribunal believed).
• Strata fee collection cases where the legal point is well-established (yes, an owner has to pay strata fees).
• Single-issue procedural detail that’s already settled (whether a notice was on time when there’s no actual ambiguity).
• Decisions where the strata is so obviously correct that the case has no instructional value.

These get clogged into the monthly summary count but don’t change what councils should be doing.

How we read each decision

For readers who want to do this themselves — not just rely on our summary — the practical reading approach we use is the one we laid out in our research guide article. The short version: find the facts in the first third of the decision, the Tribunal’s reasoning in the middle, and the order in the last paragraph. Pay attention to whether the holding turns on substance or procedure. Note the bylaw at issue and whether it matches yours.

If you want to be the council member who actually reads a CRT decision a month, we recommend picking one from each issue of this digest, opening the full decision on CanLII, and reading it. The treasurer or council president who does this for a year ends up dramatically better informed about how the Tribunal looks at strata disputes than one who doesn’t.

Reader input

If you’ve been involved in a CRT strata dispute — as a council member, an owner, a property manager, or a lawyer — and you think the decision in your matter is one we should cover, write to hello@stratanotes.ca with the citation. We read every email. We don’t promise to cover any specific decision (some are too narrow), but we do consider every suggestion.

What’s next

The first real digest ships at the end of June and will cover three or four decisions from the previous month. After that we’ll aim for the last Tuesday of every month, alongside the regular brief.

If you’d like to be told when each issue lands without checking the site, the brief is the lightweight delivery — one email a week at most, this digest included.