Ontario announces new COVID measures affecting condos

Update: Check out our exhaustive summary of the new Modified Step-2 measures.

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Ontario announced today new COVID-related measures affecting condos across the province. At this point, we only have today’s press release to go on but below are some of the measures affecting condos:

• Ontario returning to a modified Step 2 of Ontario’s roadmap to Reopening (check our COVID Tool for more details)

• Social gathering and organized public events to be limited to:
  • 5 people indoors (down from 10)
  • 10 people outdoors (down from 25)

AGMs (and, frankly, board meetings) should be held virtually for the foreseeable future.

The province is also re-aligning the gathering limits applicable to indoors “social gathering” and “organized public events”. In the last iteration of measures, indoor organized public events  were allowed greater numbers. This is no longer the case.

• Businesses and organizations to ensure employees work remotely unless the nature of their work requires them to be on site. This will certainly affect how condo management services are provided;

• Indoor meeting and event spaces must be closed (with limited exceptions);

• Indoor sport and recreational fitness facilities including gyms must be closed (with exceptions for professional athletes). I realize this is not popular news and the regulations (which I expect within the next 24 hours) may change things a little. But for now, Step 2 (as it existed last June) provides for the full closure of indoor sport and recreational fitness facilities. In the past, we had seen 2 different models:

• • • One based on reduced capacity and minimum distance between users;
    • The other was a blanket closure.

We’ll update you as soon as we see the issued regulation.

These measures will come in effect on January 5, 2022 and are expected to be in place for at least 21 days or until January 26, 2022.

We will update this post and our COVID tool once the regulations are published.

Webinar Next Week

We will cover this in greater detail at next week’s webinar.

 

Updated at 13:30.