Only for specific record types — not because the request is inconvenient or the owner is difficult to deal with.
Short answer
Partly. A board can withhold or redact a narrow list of record categories — but it can’t refuse a request wholesale just because it’s time-consuming or the requester is a difficult owner. The Condominium Authority Tribunal (CAT) hears exactly this dispute type, and the board must be afforded at least 30 days to respond to a records request before an owner can escalate.
Two independently written sources land on the same list. CAO’s guidance on meeting minutes describes redacting “records relating to employees of the corporation, other than their employment contracts,” “records relating to actual or contemplated litigation or insurance investigations,” and “records relating to other specific unit owners or units.” Ontario condo counsel describes the same categories: personal or financial information about other individual owners, material covered by solicitor-client privilege, records of an ongoing or contemplated legal proceeding, and employee personnel records. Neither source treats “we’d rather not” as a valid reason.
The board's window to respond is 30 days from a proper request. If the owner disagrees with a refusal, the CAT’s records jurisdiction splits into four distinct dispute types: Access to Records, Adequacy of Records, Entitlement to Records, and Records Retention. Adequacy covers records that are “incomplete, unclear, or not maintained as required” — a separate complaint from an outright refusal. There is no published general retention period for condo records either; CAO’s own guidance says only that different timelines exist depending on the record type, so don’t assume a fixed number of years applies across the board.
Boards sometimes conflate cost with entitlement. The Act allows the corporation to charge for producing copies, but that’s a separate question from whether the owner is entitled to the record at all. Getting the two mixed up — treating a fee disagreement as grounds to withhold the record entirely — is a common way an otherwise defensible refusal turns into a losing CAT case. Confirm which bucket the request actually falls into (core financial/governance records versus something older or non-core) before deciding cost is even the right lever to pull.
The same logic governs minutes requests specifically and applies just as much when the underlying dispute is really about a rule the corporation just passed — an owner unhappy about a new rule will often reach for a records request as the next step, and the same 30-day, narrow-refusal framework applies regardless of what triggered it.
A 30-minute call is enough to check your response process against the 30-day clock.
