A watchdog group says 93 per cent of Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario decisions consist of dismissing claims on technical grounds without a hearing – even after some applicants seeking redress for alleged racism, sexual harassment or discrimination against the disabled have waited years for justice.
Tribunal Watch Ontario says the numbers show the province’s Human Rights Tribunal has dramatically increased the number of dismissals it issues on “jurisdictional or procedural” grounds, up from two-thirds of cases in 2017-18 under the previous Liberal government.
The group blames new procedures brought in under the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Doug Ford that require what Tribunal Watch says is “onerous” paperwork, including written legal submissions on complex issues – even though most applicants have no legal counsel.
Citing data from the tribunal, the watchdog group says in a draft report that 93 per cent of the tribunal’s decisions issued in 2023-24 were jurisdictional or procedural dismissals without hearings. In about 80 per cent of those decisions, applicants were deemed to have abandoned their claim.
Those who do make it to the hearing stage are now waiting for between four and 10 years from filing a claim to receiving a decision, the report says.
In all, out of 1,450 decisions, the tribunal tossed out 1,344 applications on jurisdictional or procedural grounds in 2023-24, Tribunal Watch says, without allowing the applicant to make any oral submissions. In 2017-18, before Mr. Ford’s Progressive Conservatives were elected, the tribunal made 902 decisions, throwing out 610 cases on the same grounds, without hearings, according to numbers compiled by the group.
Tribunal Watch accuses the tribunal of “increasingly using legal technicalities” to push applicants into abandoning their claims as it wrestles with a large backlog of cases that has worsened under the current government. Cases are often dismissed, Tribunal Watch says, after applicants have been asked to file a new written submission to revive a long-languishing claim and then fail to meet a tribunal-imposed deadline.
Some applicants have even been denied the ability to testify at their own hearing after failing to file a formal written witness statement, the group says, a new requirement recently imposed on a system that was originally set up for citizens to use without legal help.
“It’s like the tribunal is taking advantage of the fact that 80 per cent of the people who file there have no lawyers,” said Kathy Laird, a lawyer and member of the steering committee for Tribunal Watch who has served as counsel to a former chair of the Human Rights Tribunal.
Other similar tribunals, even Small Claims Court in Ontario, do not impose the same stringent legal requirements the Human Rights Tribunal has adopted, she said.
Ms. Laird says the tribunal’s backlog worsened when the Ford government declined to reappoint many veteran adjudicators after it was elected in 2018. The Human Rights Tribunal has since been included in an entity called Tribunals Ontario along with 13 other bodies, along with the similarly backlogged Landlord and Tenant Board.
She says the new paperwork requirements for applicants have been brought in even as the government has kept core funding essentially frozen for the Human Rights Legal Support Centre (HRLSC), which was set up in 2008 to provide legal help to applicants. The centre now has just half the lawyers providing services to the public that it had at its inception, Tribunal Watch says. (Ms. Laird is also a former executive director of the HRLSC.)
Jack Fazzari, a spokesman for Ontario Attorney-General Doug Downey, said in an e-mail that the government was improving the province’s tribunals and was spending $28.5-million on a “modern digital case management system.” In last year’s budget, the government added $12-million over three years for Tribunals Ontario to hire more support staff, he said. He also said the government had over the last three years provided funds to help cover increased pay for legal staff at the HRLSC.
Even applicants headed to the Human Rights Tribunal with a lawyer’s help can find themselves stuck in a loop of delays, Tribunal Watch says.
Patricia Sayers, who was sexually harassed and assaulted at her job at a retailer in Durham Region, ended up settling her human-rights claim after it took six years to schedule a hearing – five years after her assailant had already been convicted in a criminal trial and the owner of the business named in her complaint had retired.
“There is no intention, on the part of our government, to have a human-rights tribunal,” she said in an interview. “They don’t want it.”