Words like ‘permission’ or ‘approval in writing’ do not matter to some people. They only take notice of the general gist of the communication/by-law/etc & view the requirements mentioned as a formality & unnecessary. Similarly, in my strata plan, an owner who was taken to task for unapproved building works, some structural, appeard to learn his lesson but simply changed from totally doing his own thing to ‘notifying’ the Executive Committee, via the Managing Agent, after the fact, then, when challenged again, improved somewhat by ‘notifying’ the Managing Agent a couple of days before doing whatever it was that required ‘permission’. He never quite got to the seeking permission beforehand stage so the EC could actually consider the request or ask for clarification or actually provide approval or dissapprove. Some people choose not to grasp that they have to wait for a result of their application/request. Unless you are willing to do all the chasing for compliance of the actual wording of the by-law, it is dangerous to ‘imply’ via the wording that the request is likely to be agreed with.