A company that owns offices and commercial space in North Burnaby has lost round two in a battle with its strata for parking spaces.

In a ruling released Wednesday, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Kevin Loo upheld the decision by strata at Ingleton Place on Hastings Street to charge commercial tenants for 24 parking spaces designated as property common in the stratification plan.

Trinden Enterprises Ltd. owns the commercial lots at Ingleton Place and rents space to various tenants, including Burnaby North-Seymour MP Terry Beech, whose constituency office is located there.

Commercial tenants in Trinden currently have 66 parking spaces identified as “limited common property” for their use.

However, for 36 years, the building’s commercial tenants also used 24 stands designated as “common property” in the strata plan, according to the judgment.

The stratas put an end to it in 2022, requiring Trinden to remove some parking signs and telling some of its commercial tenants they had to lease the parking spaces to the strata or stop using them.

This decision reduced the number of parking spaces for commercial tenants by 30 per cent and Trinden asked the province’s Civil Resolution Tribunal to order the strata to designate the disputed parking spaces exclusively for the use of commercial tenants and to reinstall commercial parking signs.

The company told the court the reallocation of parking spaces by strata went against an unwritten parking agreement and was “significantly unfair”.

But the strata said the disputed parking spaces were common property and there was never a parking agreement.

The court rejected Trinden’s request in May 2023noting that all parking spaces were within the area shown on the stratification plan as common property.

The court found that Trinden’s expectation that he would constantly monitor parking spaces was not reasonable.

Trinden then took the matter to the British Columbia Supreme Court for judicial review, but that court upheld the CRT’s decision.

Although Trinden and its predecessor had controlled the 24 parking spaces since the strata was built in 1987, Justice Loo recognized it was not reasonable for the company to expect to control them permanently.

“The CRT’s decision was not patently unreasonable and Trinden was not deprived of procedural fairness,” Loo said.

Trinden was ordered to pay the strata’s legal costs.

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