Why no response to condo owners?

Alberta condo owners would be wise to not be overly impressed by recent condo legislation announcements made by Minister Stephanie McLean and her group of condo industry insiders. As nonconflicted Alberta condo owners, we are totally supportive of new condo purchasers having improved protection. It is those of us who have already bought a condo who now face the risk of incomplete, substandard, costly and punishing condo legislation being quietly and quickly proclaimed in the NDP backrooms.

Recently, our informal, grassroots Alberta Condo Act Team (ACAT) sent a list of 25 condo ownership Improvement Ideas to all 87 elected representatives of all Alberta political parties. We have supporters from all over Alberta and our ideas are reasonable, workable, easy to implement, best practices. We wanted MLA opinions on them and to create a conversation on how to improve the many shortcomings of the current work-in-progress legislation that is about to be proclaimed into law.

Of 87 provincial requests, we only received three responses. We classified two of the three responses as “non-responsive responses” as ministers McLean and Brandy Payne generically responded. We also sent the package to 75 municipal representatives of high condo density areas and no one responded. In total, out of 162 requests we received only one credible response and that was from Dr. David Swann, Alberta Liberal MLA. Dr. Swann wrote to Minister McLean outlining his support of our efforts to make Alberta condominium legislation more inclusive, fair and balanced to condo owners than it is at present. His letter, along with the McLean and Payne submission, is on our website at

www.albertacondominiums.ca.

Condo owners need to ask their MLA why they didn’t respond to us. Depending on the answer, they might want to remember that name at election time. June Donaldson

Alberta condo owner advocate volunteer Calgary