Dosu v. Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, et al, 2026 ONSC 1918
In 2019, an application was filed alleging discrimination by York University based on race, colour, ancestry, ethnic origin and place of origin. The University sought dismissal of most of the allegations on the basis that they arose out of events that occurred outside of the statutory one-year filing period. The applicant’s position was that the allegations were a series of related events with the culminating incidents occurring less than one year before filing. Importantly, a key allegation was that the applicant was removed from her position less than a year before filing her application as reprisal for asserting her Code rights.
The Tribunal determined that it would conduct a two-part proceeding – a summary hearing to determine the reasonable prospect of success of the application at which no evidence could be called, and a second “preliminary” hearing to determine the issue of delay. The Tribunal instructed the parties that they could call evidence as part of the preliminary hearing on whether or not the delay was incurred in good faith and whether or not the respondent was prejudiced by the delay.
In a decision arising out of the preliminary hearing on delay, the Tribunal dismissed most of the allegations, relying in part on the fact that the applicant had not introduced evidence or provided a factual basis supporting the merits of the reprisal allegation, notwithstanding its own direction that no evidence could be introduced in relation to the merits of the allegations.
The Court held that the applicant had been denied procedural fairness when the Tribunal, in ruling on the issue of delay, made substantive rulings on the merits of the reprisal allegation without having allowed the applicant to substantiate her claims with appropriate evidence.
The Court stated:
“…for a decision to be reasonable it must be internally coherent and must not contain fatal flaws in its logic. I find that the conflation of the two hearings described above is evident in the HRTO reasons and renders them internally incoherent. It clouds the reasoning process and results in a lack of intelligibility in the decisions”.