About This Standard

Where it came from

THRESHOLD began with an unremarkable observation: moving into a professionally managed apartment building with a functioning tenant portal that contained essentially nothing a new tenant needed. The interesting part was what the research turned up next — that this is the normal case rather than a bad one, that it is expensive in ways nobody measures, and that a dozen funded software platforms have addressed the workflow around this problem while leaving the content itself entirely to the operator.

The standard is the attempt at the missing half. It is published by CIONAOD Inc., a multimedia publishing company based in Kanata, Ontario, and written by Kenneth M.F. McGrath.

Three names, one thing

They are related deliberately, and it is worth setting them out plainly:

Why it's free

A standard nobody can read is a sales gimmick. THRESHOLD is published in full, the self-assessment is ungated, and the renter-facing tools are free to use with no account.

CIONAOD sells verification and production services to operators who want help closing the gap. That is a real commercial interest and it is stated openly rather than hidden. But the standard has to be independently useful — an operator should be able to reach Level 1 conformance without buying anything, and if that ever stops being true the standard has failed at the thing it exists to do.

What it is not

• Not legal advice. Statutory content describes common Canadian obligations using Ontario as the reference jurisdiction. It is descriptive, not advisory, and it should be confirmed against the governing legislation and with your own counsel before you rely on it.
• Not a certification. Nothing here certifies a building as compliant with anything. The Building Threshold Score measures conformance with a published standard, and that standard is one organisation's proposal, not a regulation.
• Not a building assessment. The standard concerns information only. It says nothing about the physical condition, safety or habitability of any property.
• Not neutral about its own uncertainty. Clause 9 of the standard lists the four open questions Edition 1.0 has not settled, including whether twenty-five stages is too many and whether the mode-mismatch rule should be softened. Those are published rather than hidden because a standard that conceals its doubts cannot be trusted.

Jurisdiction

Ontario is the reference jurisdiction. The lifecycle model, the information types and the delivery modes are jurisdiction-neutral and should transfer anywhere. The statutory content is not — and Quebec's civil-law regime in particular needs separate treatment rather than adaptation.

Corrections

The municipal and provincial content on this site carries a verification date, and rules change without notice. If something here is wrong or has gone stale, saying so is genuinely useful — the change log exists precisely because this material decays, and correcting it publicly is the point rather than an embarrassment.