Ontario to Re-Enter Lockdown

On January 3, 2022, the Ontario Government announced that the province would temporarily be moving back to a modified Step 2 of the provincial reopening plan. Effective Wednesday, January 5, 2022 at 12:01 am, many indoor businesses and places open to the public must close, including restaurants, bars, museums, public pools and commercial gyms. In addition, all social or organized gatherings are reduced to five (5) people when indoors, and ten (10) people when outdoors. 

Condominium Gyms and Indoor Recreational Spaces May Remain Open

As we wrote during the previous lockdown, the advice from Toronto Public Health and the Ministry of Health has been that the closures affecting commercial gyms and other public indoor recreational facilities do not apply to condominium corporations. Unless that advice changes, or the local health unit in your region orders an amenity closed, the amenities in condominium corporations can remain open to residents, subject to the general 5-person limit on indoor gatherings. We continue to recommend that condominium corporations follow the advice of their local public health unit. 

In our view, the restrictions that apply to commercial and public gyms, indoor recreational facilities, and pools, are not meant to apply to the amenities in condominium corporations. There are several reasons for this: 

1. In Step 3, in order to be open, all indoor fitness and recreational facilities open to the public were required to have staff (or some mechanism) to actively screen all individuals entering a space for COVID-19 symptoms and record the names and contact information of every person for contact tracing purposes. If these restrictions applied to condominium corporations, it would mean that any condominium corporation that lacked staff or a technical way to control entry was required to keep all indoor amenities closed indefinitely; 

2. In Step 3, all commercial and public gyms, indoor recreational facilities, and pools were required to have a safety plan. Toronto Public Health stated that condominium corporations were not required to have safety plans, instead advising that safety plans were “strongly recommended”. There was no specific exemption in the regulations that stated that condominium corporations were not required to keep safety plans, so we infer that the restrictions generally do not apply to condominium corporations; and

3. In December, when capacity limits were introduced, gyms and other indoor public recreational facilities were required to ensure that “total number of members of the public” allowed in the space was reduced by 50%. “Members of the public” does not, in our view, include “residents of the building”. 

We do not see anything in the new regulations that changes our view on this. 

Condominium corporations are expected to be self-governing communities and, as has happened all too frequently during this pandemic, many of the questions of what to do and how to respond will fall to individual boards. The question for boards today is whether it is practical and safe to keep indoor amenities open. It may not make sense, for example, to keep a large party room facility open when only five people can attend a party. Similarly, a board may decide that closing its gym makes sense for its community, given rising Omicron statistics.

On the other hand, there may be some benefit to residents’ health to keep some amenities open for small groups of residents to exercise or gather. Boards may also decide that, to do this, they need to impose additional limits or restrictions. This may involve making a policy or passing a rule. 

As always, the rules and restrictions relating to COVID-19 are complex and constantly evolving. We will keep you updated as the situation changes.