2011: How Depreciation Reports Came to British Columbia

The background

The requirement grew out of a long-running problem: strata corporations deferring maintenance, then facing repair bills their contingency reserve funds could not absorb. The province's building envelope failures of the 1990s made the consequences unusually visible. Legislative groundwork was laid in 2009, and the regulation followed at the end of 2011, aligning BC with provinces such as Ontario and Alberta that already required this planning.

What the 2011 regulation established

• An inventory and evaluation of common property and assets.
• A projection of repair and replacement costs over thirty years.
• Three cash flow funding models, so a council could compare approaches rather than receive a single number.

Those elements have survived every subsequent amendment, and they remain the core of what a compliant report contains today.

The flaw that took twelve years to close

The original scheme let a strata corporation waive or defer the requirement by an annual three-quarter vote. Given a choice between spending money on a report and not spending it, many corporations voted to wait — and the reports that would have flagged approaching costs were never prepared.

That deferral option was finally removed effective 1 July 2024, and the deadlines that follow from its removal fall in 2026 and 2027. The corporations feeling the most pressure now are, predictably, those that used the deferral longest.