August 2017 BOARD OF DIRECTORS

HIGHLIGHTS Fibre Update We are pleased to announce that the high-speed unlimited Bell fibre internet project is moving ahead fairly quickly and Bell hopes to complete most installations in our Building by mid-September. The billing (to the Corporation) will start on October 1st. Getting your Unit connected is a TWO-STAGE process. 1. Registration. The first stage is that resident owners or tenants need to register with Bell and have a new Bell account set up. If you are already a Bell customer your old account will be closed and moved to this new account number. If you are not a current Bell customer, a new Bell account will be set up for you. Each Unit requires a Bell account – you will be renting a Bell Home Hub 3000 modem – at $0 cost. (If the internet service will be the only service you get from Bell your monthly bill will be $0.) This new Bell account can be in the name of one owner (or tenant) or several. (For rental Units the customer is the tenant, just like our Rogers cable TV accounts.) 2. Installation. During registration Bell will schedule an installation appointment with you. Installations will start here in early September; Bell hope all will be completed by midSeptember. Bell Customer Service Representatives will be here in our Building to deal with Registration (and setting up installation appointments) on:

TUESDAY 22nd August from 4pm – 8pm in the Main Lobby WEDNESDAY 30th August from 4pm – 8pm in the Main Lobby

During the registration process you can enquire about (or sign-up for) other Bell services, Some residents are thinking of moving to Bell land-line or cell phones and Bell will probably try to encourage this with special offers! Please remember that our Rogers cable TV contract continues until 2021 so you probably do NOT want to sign up for Bell Fibe TV. The registration process will take about 10 minutes and you should bring photo ID with you. During registration, the Bell representatives will schedule an installation appointment with you. Installation in a Unit can take 2-3 hours and it is essential that you be there during this time. As we noted in our last ‘Fibre Update’, testing has shown that modems will probably need to be relocated from the fibre jack to a more central location in most of the Units here to ensure good wi-fi coverage throughout our Units. Bell will have experienced technician/installers working here and they hope to be able to run the additional fibre from the wall-jacks in the Master Bedroom to a more suitable (central) location in an aesthetically pleasing way. Bell have assured us that they hope to be able to hide most or all of this fibre by running it through wall cavities and conduits. In some Units the modem may be able to remain beside the wall jack and still give acceptable wi-fi coverage. Being present during installation will give you the opportunity to discuss modem location and coverage with the Bell technicians and discuss the most appropriate way to bring the fibre from the wall jack to elsewhere in your Unit. You will also be able to get help from the technicians in getting your existing equipment hooked up and working again. When the installation is complete in your Unit, the Bell technician and you should test out your front door buzzer and phones in case the work with the fibre has disturbed the older phone wiring that shares the conduits. If you have a land-line phone you should check that you can make and receive calls and everyone should check that the intercom rings, works properly and that you can open the front door by pressing “6”. If there are problems, the technicians will deal with them at once. Installation appointments will be scheduled between the hours of 8am and 8pm and are expected to start in early September Several installation teams will be working here simultaneously and Bell hopes to complete all installations in our Building by midSeptember. As soon as installation is completed in a Unit you will have full access to the Bell fibre service and you should cancel your current internet service. If you are not able to attend either of the two Registration Sessions, don’t despair! The Bell Customer Services staff will also be in the Building during the installation period and they will set up one-on-one appointments then to get you registered and schedule your installation. After the second registration session on August 30th we will be in touch with residents who did not manage to register. Several people, mostly new residents (who currently have no internet) and a few ‘older residents’ who have term-limit internet contracts with Rogers or other providers that are expiring in the next few weeks, have asked if they can receive priority installation. This has been arranged and I have been in touch with these residents individually. If you think that 2

you also require priority installation, please get in touch with me BEFORE 11th AUGUST so that we can try to add you to the list. As we have noted before, if you currently have an @rogers email address, it will eventually be cancelled by Rogers. We suggest you set up a new email account soon and start informing your contacts; we suggest you use an email provider such as Google or Yahoo so that your internet provider and your email provider are not connected.

As owners and residents may have heard, the government are in the process of ‘activating’ many of the recent changes made to the Ontario Condominium Act. Most, such as mandatory licencing of Managers, will be useful but invisible to owners but several will certainly have a visible effect. In particular:

 Starting in fall 2017 all new Directors of condominium corporations in Ontario will have to take training and pass an ‘examination’ to ensure they (we!) fully understand our responsibilities (many) and our powers (few). Details are awaited with interest!  Starting in 2018 all condominium corporations will have to send out regular ‘bulletins’ to owners – these will contain information that is now made available to those who request a ‘status certificate’ (names of Directors, name of Management Company etc). The information that will be included should not come as a surprise to anyone at MTCC 573 where we have made great efforts for several years to keep owners informed and involved.  Creation of a Province-wide public directory of all condominium corporations and their Directors.  Creation of a “low-cost dispute resolution process”. This is probably a good idea, though we have had VERY few serious disputes between owners and the Corporation at MTCC 573 in the last 35 years. The one, fairly recent, dispute that reached mediation was certainly costly, for everyone involved, and anything that can reduce costs is welcomed.  These changes come with a price and we will be paying a fee of $1 per month per Unit to the new Condominium Authority of Ontario starting from September 1st, 2017. See: http://www.condoauthorityontario.ca/ and https://www.ontario.ca/page/condominium-law-changes 3

Q.

Is the Corporation involved in any legal matters at the moment?

A.

The simple answer is “No”. The last ‘legal matter’ that we were involved with was the agreement for Bell to bring fibre into our Building and then the negotiation of the contract and the drafting of our new By-Law #7 on Telecommunications. These discussions are now satisfactorily concluded. That said, we do have two legal items that we and the Corporation’s lawyers (Lash Condo Law) will be dealing with in the next year or so. Both could be described as “pending”. Firstly, our General By-Law (#5) – which dates from 2004 - contains some minor typographical errors and references to dissolved organisations: it should be ‘tidied up’. However, because the recent changes to the Condominium Act may require additional changes, we intend to do this only after the recent amendments are all in effect and the new Regulations have been tested. We expect that amendments to By-Law 5 will be brought to owners for approval at the AGMs in either 2018 or 2019. Secondly, as discussed in many earlier editions of Highlights and at several AGMs, we will be going to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to have the inconsistency about windows in our Declaration dealt with. As owners know, we will be asking the Court to amend our Declaration so that the Corporation (not owners) has clear responsibility for the repair and replacement of Unit windows (both glass and frames.) As we plan to take over this responsibility only when the frames need replacement (estimated in about a decade), and want to wait to be sure that the new Act will not require additional Declaration changes; we are unsure at the moment when we will go to Superior Court.

Upcoming building work Starting on or about August 21st (weather dependent), our regular contractor (Novum Construction) will be on site to replace the rest of the concrete on the loading dock (about a third was replaced in 2014) and to carry out some brickwork repair at the south-east corner of the building (above the walkway). Neither of these projects will directly impact residents but there will certainly be noise and while the loading dock work is going on the dock will be unavailable. While Novum are here with a platform lift they will also be repainting the concrete around the 2nd and 3rd floor decks. While they are painting the deck will be closed – probably only for a day.

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