The Syndicate Attestation: What It Contains, and What It Doesn't Say

Since August 14, 2025, every condo resale in Quebec comes with a new document: the syndicate's attestation on the state of the co-ownership. It is the most useful thing the law has added to condo files in years. It is also easy to mistake for more than it is.

Why it exists

For decades, a buyer could close on a Quebec condo without anyone being required to tell them the financial health of the building. The Civil Code required a contingency fund (fonds de prévoyance), with a floor of 5% of owners' contributions to common expenses: a number unrelated to what the building actually needed. Many syndicates (syndicats de copropriétaires) did no more. The result was underfunded reserves, deferred work, and special assessments (cotisations spéciales) that fell on whoever owned the unit when the bill came, often a buyer who had just closed.

The information to see it coming usually existed, spread across minutes (procès-verbaux), financial statements and correspondence. Getting it depended on the syndicate's cooperation, and responses to brokers' requests ranged from thorough to nothing at all.

After a government working group reported in 2011 and an advisory committee in 2012, the legislature adopted Bill 16 in December 2019. It attacked the problem from three directions. A maintenance log (carnet d'entretien) records what the building needs. A contingency fund study (étude du fonds de prévoyance), renewed every five years, prices it and sets contributions accordingly. The attestation tells the buyer where the fund stands against that price. The regulation that brought all three into force took effect on August 14, 2025.

How it works

Article 1068.1 of the Civil Code of Québec requires the seller to provide the promising buyer (promettant acheteur), in due course, with the syndicate's attestation, in a form and with content set by regulation. The syndicate must give the attestation to any co-owner who asks, within 15 days, and update it at least once a year, so a seller can get it before listing. In practice it often arrives after the promise to purchase is signed, when your buyer's conditions are already running.

The regulation sets out what the syndicate must report, including:

• the contingency fund balance, and the amount the contingency fund study recommends it should hold
• common charges billed and collected over the last three years
• funds available for current expenses, the current year's budget, and the surplus or deficit for the last three fiscal years
• a statement that the syndicate holds its insurance, the self-insurance fund (fonds d'autoassurance) balance and the highest deductible
• inspections and expert reports, losses, and major work over the last five years, with dates and costs
• major work planned for the next ten years, with estimated dates and costs
• pending court proceedings, and amendments to the declaration of co-ownership (déclaration de copropriété) over the last three years

It must be dated and signed by a person authorized to give it.

The two comparisons to make first

1. Fund against recommendation. The gap between the contingency fund balance and the study's recommended amount is a rough measure of what the building will eventually ask its owners to make up, through higher charges, a special assessment, or both.
2. Deductible against self-insurance. This tells you who pays when there is a claim. If the water damage deductible is $100,000 and the self-insurance fund holds $20,000, the difference can land on the co-owners. Your buyer would be one of them.

Where it stops

The attestation is official, signed and standardized, which makes it tempting to treat it as the answer. It is a disclosure, not an analysis. Four limits matter.

1. It is a snapshot with a little history. It gives three years of charges and results, but the contingency fund at a single date. It does not show whether the fund was drawn down last year to pay for work or cover a deficit. The financial statements do.
2. The planned-work list is only as good as the syndicate's planning. The regulation requires major work planned over ten years, with estimated dates and costs. Without a study or maintenance log, that list can be thin, unpriced or marked "to be determined." It also doesn't say how many times a project has been put off. The minutes do.
3. It lists without explaining. A pending lawsuit appears as a line item. What is at stake, and what the board expects, is in the minutes and the financial statements.
4. It does not connect the documents. The finding that matters to your buyer is often in the space between them: a budget that does not fund what the study recommends, a deductible the minutes show was just raised, a lawsuit whose cost appears nowhere in the budget.

For brokers, the point is simple. The attestation is a starting point, not a substitute for careful diligence and a careful reading of the whole file. It makes the first step easier; it does not replace the others.

Until 2028: working without the benchmark

By August 15, 2028, every syndicate should have a compliant maintenance log and contingency fund study: a 25-year view of the work the common portions will need, and a qualified professional's recommendation of how much the fund should hold to pay for it. Once that is in place, the fund-against-recommendation comparison will give your buyer a direct read on whether the building is keeping up.

We are not there yet. Until then, many files fall into one of four situations:

1. 01No study at allThe attestation is issued without a recommended amount, and the balance stands alone.
2. 02An older studyA study done before August 14, 2023 may rest on costs, assumptions and a scope that no longer reflect the building. Its recommendation is a data point, not a benchmark.
3. 03A new study the budget hasn't caught up withThe study recommends higher contributions; this year's budget does not reflect them yet. That gap is a coming increase in common charges, or an assessment.
4. 04A study in progressThe minutes show a professional has been hired. The findings, and the bill, are still to come.

That last situation deserves attention. For a building that contributed a flat percentage for years, the first study that prices 25 years of work can bring a sharp jump in contributions or a vote on a special assessment. Your buyer may be buying in just before that number lands.

So for the next few years, the work is reconstruction. Without the benchmark, you build the picture from what is there: the building's age and major components and when each was last replaced; the fund and contribution history across three years of statements; past special assessments; what the minutes say has been commissioned, flagged or deferred; and any older study or engineering report, read for what it identified rather than what it recommended.

One file, read two ways

An illustrative example

60 units · 1980s

Fund (attestation)

$180,000

Recommended amount

none, no study yet

Fund over three years

flat, no increase in contributions

Roof replacement

quoted $420,000, deferred twice

Gap on the roof alone

$240,000, about $4,000 per unit

The attestation for a 60-unit building from the 1980s shows a contingency fund of $180,000, no pending litigation and, among planned work, a roof replacement, "date and cost to be determined after the study." There is no recommended amount, because the syndicate has no study yet. Read alone, it is not alarming: money in the fund, nothing in dispute, a project on the list without a date.

Read with the rest of the package, it changes. The financial statements show the fund near $180,000 for three years running, with no increase in contributions. Minutes from two consecutive annual meetings show a roof replacement quoted at $420,000 and deferred both times until the study is done. The most recent minutes show the board has now hired a professional to do it.

Put together: the building faces a known $420,000 roof, holds $180,000, has not raised contributions, and is about to receive the first study that will price everything else. The roof gap alone averages about $4,000 per unit before the study adds anything.

The amount, the history of deferrals and the gap are not in the attestation. They are in the package. And it is a number your buyer can negotiate with.

What the decisions say about brokers who passed on these documents unread: A broker's diligence.

What to do with it

• Read it the day it arrives, and request the documents behind it at the same time: two or three years of minutes, the financial statements, the study and maintenance log if they exist, and the declaration of co-ownership with its amendments.
• Make the two comparisons.
• Read the documents against each other, not one at a time.
• Turn findings into numbers. A fund shortfall, a deductible exposure, a likely assessment: each is a negotiation point, not just a red flag.

Sources

• Civil Code of Québec, art. 1068.1
• Regulation establishing various rules concerning divided co-ownership, s. 10