The crisis continues in some of Ontario’s most important adjudicative tribunals. Tribunals Ontario posted its 2021/22 Annual Report on its website in September 2022, documenting the state of its 14 tribunals as of March 31, 2022, the end of its fiscal year. This latest Annual Report demonstrates that several key Ontario adjudicative tribunals are failing to deliver timely and accessible justice in accordance with their statutory mandates.

The Annual Report indicates that the four largest tribunals within Tribunals Ontario have a collective backlog of over 67,000 cases. This has resulted in unprecedented delays in processing and resolving cases in a timely and accessible way. Increasingly, the people who must rely on adjudicative tribunals to resolve legal disputes are discovering that justice delayed is indeed justice denied.

The backlogs at four key tribunals:

This number was omitted from the Annual Report. A Freedom of Information request reported this number as of December 31, 2021

The massive delays and failure to provide accessible dispute resolution have real and often life changing consequences. For example:

• Small landlords are losing their life savings because of an inability to obtain an eviction order from the Landlord and Tenant Board.
• Tenants are unable to have their disputes resolved in a timely and accessible way, including disputes resulting in unsafe living conditions or homelessness, or involving unreasonable conduct by landlords.
• People who have experienced discrimination in employment, services, or housing, as well as people such as employers and business owners seeking to respond to these allegations, are unable to obtain a resolution at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.
• People who are disabled and unable to work are unable to obtain their benefits under the Ontario Disability Support Program, and must instead subsist on general welfare because of backlogs at the Social Benefits Tribunal
• People who have been severely injured in a motor vehicle accident and have been unfairly denied insurance benefits cannot obtain resolution because of backlogs at the Automobile Accident Benefits Service of the Licence Appeal Tribunal.

While the Annual Report indicates that Tribunals Ontario is aware of its backlog problem, the solutions identified are not sufficient to deal with the backlogs in any meaningful way.

In addition to the impact on the individuals whose case are delayed, the backlogs, delays and lack of accessible justice are demoralizing for the many staff and adjudicators within the system who are doing their best in very difficult circumstances.

Tribunal Watch Ontario calls on all parties to commit to ensuring timely and meaningful access to justice at Tribunals Ontario, including its four largest tribunals – the Landlord and Tenant Board, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, the Social Benefits Tribunal and the Licence Appeal Tribunal (which hears automobile accident benefit claims).

As Tribunal Watch Ontario has reported in the past, the Ontario Government has, since first elected in 2018, failed to re-appoint or retain most of the experienced adjudicators who had been first appointed to provincial tribunals by the previous Liberal government. The Government then failed for several years to appoint a sufficient number of new adjudicators to fill the vacancies. This has resulted in unprecedented delays for members of the public who need the services provided by these tribunals. Although in the past two years, the Government has moved to fill these positions, the high turnover of adjudicators has meant a loss of expertise and experience that continues to affect the quality and timeliness of justice that is delivered to the public. The crisis persists.

Tribunal Watch Ontario has issued a series of Statements of Concern highlighting the deteriorating quality of justice now being delivered at Tribunals Ontario. In 2021, Tribunal Watch Ontario conducted a survey of tribunal users. The results, although limited, were overwhelmingly negative in terms of confidence in the timeliness and fairness of tribunal processes, as well as in the expertise and independence of tribunal adjudicators.

One issue raised repeatedly by tribunal users is the decision by Tribunals Ontario to remove in-person hearings as an option in all but exceptional cases. After introducing electronic hearings as a pandemic measure, Tribunals Ontario announced, in November 2020, that electronic hearings would be the standard hearing format going forward for all its tribunals. Tribunals Ontario has created an onerous process for requesting an in-person hearing that can be contrasted with that of the federal Social Security Tribunal (SST) which serves a similar population. The SST allows appellants to select an in-person hearing as an option on the initial Notice of Appeal form.

See Type of hearing – still your choice (sst-tss.gc.ca). The Social Security Tribunal of Canada states on its website that: “Offering various hearing options is part of our commitment to access to justice”.

Although electronic hearings are an important option to offer parties, both the Ontario Bar Association (OBA) and the Canadian Bar Association 2 have separately cautioned about the potential negative impact of an almost-mandatory digital format for people living in poverty or facing other barriers to electronic participation. 3 Legal clinics are reporting that, since March 2020, they are only aware of a single in-person hearing at the Landlord and Tenant Board, suggesting that there is little flexibility in Tribunals Ontario “digital first” policy. Thousands of electronic hearings take place monthly at the LTB.

Here are some indicators of the growing crisis at the Landlord and Tenant Board, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, the Social Benefits Tribunal, and the Licence Appeal Tribunal, four tribunals that together serve the needs of hundreds of thousands of Ontarians: