February 13, 2025

Statement of Concern – Under the Ford Government:  Justice Delayed and Denied at the Landlord and Tenant Board, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario and the Licence Appeal Tribunal

In December 2024, Tribunals Ontario released its much-delayed Annual Report for 2023/24, and despite self-congratulatory messaging, the data inside demonstrates that there are serious deficits in the quality, accessibility and timeliness of justice at three of its busiest tribunals – the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB), the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) and the Licence Appeal Tribunal-Automobile Accident Benefits Service (LAT-AABS), which hears motor vehicle injury claims against insurance companies.

Early in its first term, the Ford Government moved these three important tribunals, used by tens of thousands of Ontarians every year, into a new thirteen-tribunal entity, Tribunals Ontario. The Government moved quickly to put its own stamp on these and other Ontario tribunals, stripping them of expertise by replacing experienced leadership, often with Tory insiders, and appointing decision-makers who lacked demonstrated knowledge of the relevant law or experience in mediating and adjudicating disputes. In 2020, the Government appointed a new Executive Chair to lead Tribunals Ontario.

At the LTB, the HRTO and the LAT-AABS, which together conduct almost 90 percent of all the hearings at Tribunals Ontario, the new leadership has implemented changes that have undercut fair process, particularly for self-represented litigants.

Today, Ontario tenants and landlords, human rights claimants and respondents, as well as injured drivers and passengers seeking accident benefits, all face a combination of unconscionable delays, diminished expertise and/or stiff new barriers in accessing a justice process that, before 2019, delivered timely resolutions including for those without legal representation.

In recent months, other organizations have raised the alarm about the track record of these three tribunals. In November 2024, the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) called for urgent reforms at the LTB, including the re-introduction of in-person hearings as a default option. The TRREB report found, among other things, that electronic hearings have introduced inefficiencies and “amplified accessibility issues, especially for vulnerable groups”, reinforcing the 2023 findings of Ontario’s Ombudsman that the LTB was “fundamentally failing in its role of providing swift justice”. The Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, and several municipal councils including Toronto, have also called for the return of in-person LTB hearings in local communities, as a matter of equity and efficiency.

Turning to the HRTO, the Ontario Human Rights Commission, in response to recently proposed procedural changes at the HRTO, made a public submission expressing concern that the HRTO risks creating “further inefficiencies in the human rights system and could limit the ability of claimants (particularly those from marginalized communities) to effectively access human rights remedies.” Tribunal Watch Ontario released a statement in November 2024, documenting the heightened procedural barriers for litigants before the HRTO, and the precipitous drop in discrimination hearings.

Finally, with respect to the LAT-AABS, the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association (OTLA) has recently raised the alarm about the claim determination process for victims of motor vehicle accidents that it describes as “overly rigid” and “fraught with procedural unfairness”. A report released by the OTLA in November 2024, raises important questions about the qualifications and training of LAT adjudicators and calls for an “immediate review” of the functioning of the tribunal.

Below are our detailed findings.

The Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB)

The LTB hears and decides disputes under the Residential Tenancies Act related to rental housing. Almost 90% of applications are filed by landlords, with a very significant majority of these applications being eviction applications for arrears of rent. In 2019, the LTB was moved by the Ford government into Tribunals Ontario.

Here is what we learned about the LTB from the Tribunals Ontario 2023/24 Annual Report and the related statistics on the Tribunals Ontario website.

• The LTB was unable to reduce its unprecedented backlog during the 2023/24 fiscal year covered by the Annual Report. The number of outstanding applications dropped by only 27 cases, from 53,057 cases on March 31, 2023, to 53,030 cases on March 31, 2024.
• In a very unusual move, the Annual Report, although delivered to the Attorney General on June 30, 2024, includes data from four months of the current fiscal year, for the period ending July 31, 2024. This add-on data shows a backlog reduction in the current year to 46,632 cases, an achievement to be sure, but one that is reported prematurely and may or may not be sustained by current year’s end.
• A backlog of 46,632 cases as of July 31, 2024, is not a success story compared to an average backlog of less than14,000 cases in the four years before the LTB was moved into Tribunals Ontario.
• The Executive Chair writes in his introduction to the Annual Report that the LTB made good progress in reducing service delays and would have seen a decrease in its active cases but for an “extraordinary” 31% increase in incoming applications.
• Neither of these statements is particularly borne out by the data that follows in the Annual Report. In fact, only 35% of cases are reported to be within target “lifecycle” timeframes, with no comparative numbers available for the previous year.¹
• The Operational Highlights section of the Annual Report, relying on data from the first four months of the next (current) fiscal year, states that timelines to hearing in arrears evictions were reduced to 90 days by the end of July 2024.
• However, the improved timelines at the start of the current fiscal year serve to highlight the astonishing service delays that have developed since the LTB moved into Tribunals Ontario. Below are the comparative timelines for scheduling arrears applications over the past years, taken from the Open Data on Tribunals Ontario’s website:

  Fiscal Year 1st Quarter	Average Days: Filing to 1st Hearing Day
  2024/25	91
  2023/24	134
  2022/23	154
  2021/22	65
  2020/21	47
  2019/20	35
  2018/19	32
  2017/18	32

• Neither is the claimed reduction in service delays consistent with the reported data on wait times for callers to the LTB Call Centre. Callers to the helpline waited 27 minutes, compared to an average wait time of 9 minutes in the years before the LTB was moved into Tribunals Ontario. And before 2019, the Call Centre answered far more calls – on average 100,000 more calls – every year. The 27-minute wait time can only be viewed as an improvement compared to an all-time worst wait time in 2022/23: 36 minutes.
• The claimed “extraordinary” 31% increase in incoming cases is also not based on the fiscal year numbers in the Annual Report. The statistics in the Report show only a 12% increase in incoming applications, year over year.
• The actual number of incoming cases for the fiscal year, as reported in the Annual Report statistics, was 82,285. This is not an “extraordinary” figure, as the chart below shows. The numbers are taken from successive Annual Reports.

  Year	New Cases
  2023/24	82,285
  2022/23	73,476
  2021/22	61,586
  2020/21	48,422
  2019/20	80,874
  2018/19	82,095
  2017/18	80,791
  2016/17	81,432

• On a positive note, the LTB was able to significantly increase the number of resolved applications in the fiscal year, from 52,986 in 2022/23, to 88,306 in 2023/24, but it took an enormous increase in the number of adjudicators to achieve this.
• In 2023/24, it took about twice as many adjudicators to resolve the same number of applications, as compared to 2018/19.
• Analysis of the number of applications resolved in 2023/24 compared to the number of adjudicators appointed suggest that the changes introduced at the LTB under the Ford government have reduced by half the capacity of appointed adjudicators to resolve applications.²
• One reason for this drop in capacity is likely the loss of experienced adjudicators with subject matter expertise.
• Data in the Annual Report sheds light on another reason why adjudicators today are unable to resolve a comparable volume of applications: far fewer applications are resolved through hearing-day settlements since Tribunals Ontario removed the right to an in-person hearing and closed all 44 regional hearing centres across the province.
• An endnote to Table 1 in the 2023/24 Annual Report states that only 6% of all closed applications were resolved by mediation, the same rate as reported in 2022/23. This is a drop of over 50% from the percentage of mediated resolutions achieved in the pre-pandemic years before the LTB dropped in-person hearings in favour of digital hearings.
• The LTB has settled on average just over 5,000 cases annually beginning in 2020/21, compared to an annual average of 10,779 in the five previous fiscal years. This drop in mediated settlements alone explains more than have of today’s backlog.
• This point is corroborated by a statistic last reported in the 2015/16 Annual Report: on average, when both parties attended an in-person hearing, 35.5% of all applications were resolved through mediated agreements on the hearing day.
• Since 2020, in-person LTB hearings in your own community have been replaced by electronic or “digital” hearings, scheduled in province-wide hearing blocks.
• Tenants, in the past, were assisted at their in-person hearing by local legal clinic lawyers acting as duty counsel on site at regional hearing centres. Duty counsel in the past were instrumental in achieving the high rate of settlement on the hearing day. Today, tenants struggle to connect electronically with duty counsel when they phone in or zoom in to a province-wide hearing block.
• Forty-four regional hearing centres across the province were closed by the government, saving money, while over $19 million was spent on a case management system that is still, years later, unable to provide basic transparent data in key areas.
• Only 25 in-person hearings were held at the LTB in 2023/24, compared to 74,098 electronic hearings.
• Legal clinics and Ontario’s Ombudsman have reported that tenant households are often forced to participate in hearings on an unequal footing, connecting by telephone while the landlord and adjudicator participate in a Zoom hearing room.
• The Report cites the low rate of requests for in-person hearings as an indication that virtual hearings are preferred but the experience of legal clinic lawyers indicates that this is instead evidence of barriers in the application process for an in-person hearing and the impact of the low rate of approval.

Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO)

The Human Rights Code, with protection against discrimination based on race, disability, sex and other personal characteristics, is one of Ontario’s most important laws. For people facing discrimination, bringing an application under the Code to the HRTO is often their only enforcement option. Under section 40 of the Code, the HRTO is mandated to dispose of applications by adopting procedures that offer “the best opportunity for a fair, just and expeditious resolution of the merits of the applications”.

In 2019, the HRTO, like the LTB, was moved into the newly created Tribunals Ontario. The data in Tribunals Ontario’s 2023/24 Annual Report demonstrates that the HRTO today is no longer offering applicants a process that is “fair, just and expeditious” and has largely abandoned consideration of the merits of the applications before it. A system designed to accommodate applicants with no legal representation is increasingly using legal technicalities to deny hearings to people who want to present their case.

• 97% of final decisions in 2023/24 – 1,389 out of 1,429 final decisions – were dismissals of claims without considering the merits at a hearing, most often after being stalled for years in the HRTO backlog.
• 1,389 represents a two-fold increase in no-hearing dismissals since the HRTO was moved into Tribunals Ontario. In 2017/18, the full fiscal year before the move, it dismissed 610 applications without a hearing.
• Even this alarming figure – 97% – is an under-representation. Table 2 in the Annual Report states that there were 40 merit decisions released after a full discrimination hearing, but an examination of each of the decisions as reported on the Tribunals Ontario Open Portal, shows that only 33 were in fact merit decisions based on a full hearing of evidence.
• Seven of the claimed merit decisions were in fact dismissals without a hearing.
• Of the remaining 33 decisions categorized as “merit” decisions, five were cases where the application was dismissed at hearing without an unrepresented applicant being allowed to testify, because they had failed to file a witness statement. This is notwithstanding the fact that each had completed a comprehensive application form setting out the facts upon which they based their claim.³
• One of these five applicants had been waiting since 2016 for their application to get to a hearing – 7 years. The others had filed in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.
• If you remove these five cases from the 33 decisions, on the basis that they were not in fact decided after a full hearing on their merits, of the remaining 28 final decisions, five were uncontested, filed at least three years earlier, and seemingly could have been expedited.
• All of the 33 merit decisions were based on applications filed years earlier. Fully 29 were filed four or more years previously.
• Finally, two of the final merit decisions were in respect of hearings that started years previously, but the then-presiding adjudicator was no longer appointed, so the hearing had to be started all over again.⁴
• This is a very sorry track record: in the six years before the HRTO was moved into Tribunals Ontario, it averaged 114 full merit decisions a year.
• Before the HRTO was moved into Tribunals Ontario, parties also did not have to wait years for a hearing and final decision. In 2017/18, for example, 69% of final merits decisions were released within two years of filing.
• Even though 80 percent of people filing claims have no legal representation, applicants are now being compelled to file complex written legal and factual submissions at various stages in the process, or else see their case dismissed.
• In the very few cases that move forward, there is a new pre-hearing requirement to file a summary of every issue in dispute and every outstanding procedural, substantive or jurisdictional issue, in addition to witness statements.
• Claimants are now not allowed to testify at all at their own hearings if they have failed to file their own witness statement, notwithstanding their completion of a detailed application form setting out the basis for their discrimination claim.
• Adding to the impact of these new requirements, the Human Rights Legal Support Centre, funded to provide free legal services to unrepresented applicants, has cut its legal services drastically according to its own 2023/24 Annual Report. Frozen funding from the Ontario Government has meant a 50 percent reduction in legal staff. Thousands fewer people are now helped by the Centre every year.
• There are strong indications that unrepresented applicants with legitimate but stalled claims are simply giving up when confronted with the onerous new filing requirements.
• Based on Tribunals Ontario’s website data, 1,083 applications were abandoned in 2023/24, as compared to 374 in 2017/18. This is a three-fold increase. Most applicants who abandoned their cases were unrepresented and had waited years in the backlog, only walking away when faced with a tribunal-initiated demand for additional legal submissions.
• The public seems to be turning away from the HRTO as a viable forum for seeking human rights remedies. The average number of applications filed in the three years ending on March 31, 2024, was 3,621. The compares to an average of 4,449 in the previous three years, which include the pandemic years.
• Despite this substantial drop in incoming cases, the backlog doubled between 2016/17 and 2022/23, from 4,696 to 9,527.
• The Annual Reports for the years 2017/18 to 2020/21, did not include a figure for the outstanding caseload at the end of the fiscal year. Here is the available backlog data:

  Year	Backlog
  2023/24	8,546
  2022/23	9,527
  2021/22	9,049
  2016/17	4,696
  2015/16	3,242
  2015/15	3,101

• Although the HRTO did manage to reduce the backlog to 8,546 by the end of 2023/24, it is unclear how it managed to close over 1,000 more files than in the previous year, particularly as there were fewer final decisions and even a small increase in case processing times. There is no data on how many cases were closed after achieving a full settlement.
• An increasing number of human rights claimants are finding that their applications have been dismissed because of the HRTO’s own errors in handling files. A review of all successful reconsideration applications in 2023/24 revealed that 29 of the 39 overturned dismissals (74%) involved administrative error by the HRTO, almost always a failure to upload documents filed by the applicant.
• In the first quarter of the current year, the numbers were even more alarming. Of 13 dismissal decisions overturned, 11 (86%) involved an administrative error at the expense of the applicant, and one involved an adjudicator error.
• By way of comparison, in 2017/18, there were only 11 successful reconsideration applications and only five (45%) involved administrative error.

LICENCE APPEAL TRIBUNAL – AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT BENEFITS SERVICE (LAT-AABS)

The Automobile Accident Benefits Service (AABS) resolves disputes between people injured in car accidents and their own insurance company, over such benefits as medical treatment expenses and income replacement benefits. The AABS was moved into LAT in 2016, and LAT-AABS was moved into Tribunals Ontario by the Ford government in 2019.

The LAT-AABS now has the second-largest caseload of all tribunals under the Tribunals Ontario umbrella, with more than 16,000 applications received in 2023-24. Its backlog grew substantially after it was moved into Tribunals Ontario, more than doubling between 2018/19 and 2021/22 despite a relatively small cumulative increase during that period in incoming cases. Here are the numbers from Annual Reports:

Year	New Appeals	Decisions	Settled/Withdrawn	Files Closed	Backlog
2018/19	13,565	369	10,021	10,390	7,341
2019/20	14,711	396	11,433	12,087	9,571
2020/21	15,619	664	13,011	12,070	12,070
2021/22	15,796	555	11,116	11,681	16,185
2022/23	13,976	587	15,337	16,271	13,890
2023/24	16,142	1,088	16,941	18,016	12,016

Although Tribunals Ontario seems to have finally put the brakes on the LAT-AABS’s growing backlog, this claim comes with a couple of caveats:

• A recent report commissioned for the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association (OTLA), a plaintiff-side group, shows a dramatic drop in the percentage of cases won at the LAT-AABS by claimants injured in auto accidents.
• It found that the success rate for appellants dropped from 33 per cent to only 10 per cent after the LAT took over jurisdiction in these cases in 2016. In contrast, success rate for insurance companies in the same period rose from 56 to 71 per cent, while split decisions went from 11 to 19 per cent.
• A process that was supposed to empower self-represented accident victims, was found to have failed miserably, with only 33 successful claims by self-represented claimants out of 4,500 decisions since 2016.
• The report raises questions about the qualifications and training of LAT-AABS adjudicators. The medical-legal issues dealt with by LAT-AABS are often complex and technical, but many of the adjudicators appointed by the Ford government had no or limited experience with the relevant subject matter.
• According to the OTLA report, the LAT-AABS process is “overly rigid” and “fraught with procedural unfairness” – such as limiting the number of witnesses – and fails to accommodate requests for such things as adjournments, even when both parties agree (see: https://canlii.ca/t/k6wmr).
• The procedural roadblocks and delays, combined with the inexperience and lack of qualifications of many adjudicators, are reported to be contributing to the skewed results for cases that go to hearings.
• The LAT-AABS increased the number of final decisions issued from 587 in 2022-23 to 1,088 in 2023-24. While this is a significant increase, the main reported reason for the increase in closed cases was an increase in the number closed as “settled/withdrawn”. That number increased from 15,337 in 2022-23 to 16,941 in 2023-24. This represented almost 94% of its closed files for the fiscal year.
• The Annual Report offers no breakdown of the “settled/withdrawn” category, which raises concerns that, as at the HRTO, unrepresented claimants are withdrawing their appeals, or entering into disadvantageous settlements, because the process has become too onerous without legal counsel.
• Further, without detailed data from the Tribunals Ontario showing how long it actually takes to get a decision in the 6 percent of closed cases that go to a final hearing, it is impossible to accurately evaluate the timeliness of the process.
• Lawyers who appear at the LAT-AABS report that they advise clients that it could take a year until a decision is issued after a hearing.
• LAT’s delays in issuing decisions can present severe difficulties for claimants requiring medical treatments or income replacement. There are also long-term costs, often to the publicly funded health system, of injured claimants not receiving timely treatment.

CONCLUSION

The LTB, HRTO and LAT-AABS are only three (3) of the thirteen (13) tribunals clustered under the leadership of Tribunals Ontario, but they are responsible almost 90 percent of all the hearings conducted at Tribunals Ontario. Of over 101,000 hearings held at the thirteen tribunals in 2023/24, almost 90,000 were before one of these three tribunals.

Deficits in the quality, timeliness and fairness of the dispute resolution process at these three tribunals are not a side note to an otherwise successful track record for Tribunals Ontario. Rather, the continuing crisis at these three tribunals, and the public calls for immediate review and reform, serve as an indictment of the leadership of Tribunals Ontario.

Tribunals Ontario is taking these tribunals down the wrong track; redirection is long overdue. Tribunal Watch Ontario believes that a good first step would be to restore the right to in-person hearings, with digital hearings as an option. This would result in a more efficient and fair process, especially at the LTB, as more applications would settle without needing a full hearing and fewer parties would face digital barriers. The removal of onerous procedural rules, particularly at the HRTO and the LAT, is also critical to restoring accessibility and equity to two regimes that were introduced under previous governments with the explicit goal of creating a hearing process that would be easily navigable by Ontarians who could not afford a lawyer.

1. In 2022/23, the wait time was 36 minutes and the Call Centre answered only 122,933 calls.  Compare this to 286,869 calls answered in 2014/15, when the wait time was 6 minutes. ↩︎
2. In 2018/19, the LTB received 82,095 new applications and resolved 79,476 applications. In that fiscal year, approximately 53 adjudicators (44 full time and 9 part time) resolved the 79,476 applications, and the backlog stood at 14,476.
   
   If we divide the number of applications resolved by the total number of adjudicators, this translates into each adjudicator resolving on average 1,499.5 applications during the year.
   If we assume the part timers were only scheduled half time, and cut the number to 4.5 part-timers, each adjudicator was able to resolve 1,639 cases.
   
   In 2023/24, the LTB received 82,285 new applications and resolved 88,307. In that fiscal year, approximately 134 adjudicators (75 full time and 59 part time) resolved the 88,307 applications, and the backlog stood at 53,030.
   
   If we divide the number of applications resolved in 23/24 by the total number of adjudicators, each adjudicator resolved, on average, 659 applications during the year. Again, we do not know how frequently the part timers were scheduled. If we divide the 59 part-timers by half, assuming a half workload, the total number of adjudicators would be 104.5. Using this estimated number, each adjudicator would handle 845 case resolutions. ↩︎
3. By way of comparison, Ontario’s Small Claims Court, another forum designed to be accessible to self-represented parties, does not require witness statements. ↩︎
4. One of these was an ultimately uncontested sexual harassment claim filed by the claimant in 2014 – a wait of ten years for a final decision. The other was filed in 2017, first went to hearing in 2019 and was finally completed in 2023. ↩︎