Tribunals Ontario counters that its data indicates “a very high quality of decisions” by tribunals
In at least 28 cases in recent years, Ontario courts have overturned rulings by the province’s tribunals based on concerns that the tribunals engaged in procedural unfairness, displayed inadequate reasoning, ignored evidence, and more, according to findings by a watchdog group.
The watchdog is Tribunal Watch Ontario, whose steering committee includes former tribunal adjudicators and lawyers with experience appearing before federal and provincial tribunals. According to the watchdog, the 28 cases – for which Ontario’s courts issued rulings between 2021 and 2025 – support its position that Ontario’s tribunals have treated litigants less fairly since Premier Doug Ford took office in 2018.
The watchdog said that since then, the Ford government has appointed a number of adjudicators without subject matter expertise and tackled case backlogs by using flimsy reasons to dismiss litigants’ cases. Ford merged Ontario’s previously separate tribunals into Tribunals Ontario, a single umbrella entity, in 2019.
Brian Cook, a member of the watchdog’s steering committee who served for a decade as a vice chair of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario and has held appointments at other tribunals, says that while adjudicators can be trained to learn a new area of law, “depending on the tribunal, the learning curve can be several years before you really start to be an expert.”
Cook says courts have historically deferred to tribunal decisions because they were staffed with subject matter experts.
“It appears that the courts are perhaps realizing that these expert tribunals may have lost some of their expertise, and therefore it may be necessary for the courts to intervene more so than they would have in the past,” he adds.
In a statement on Friday, a spokesperson for Tribunals Ontario said the watchdog’s allegations “lack both credibility and evidentiary support.”
The spokesperson said Tribunals Ontario uses “a rigorous, competitive, and merit-based selection process for the appointment of adjudicators to ensure skilled and qualified individuals are considered.” Potential candidates for each tribunal are assessed based on their experience, knowledge, or training in the tribunal’s subject matter, their aptitude for impartial adjudication, and other criteria.
The spokesperson added that Tribunals Ontario requires adjudicators to undergo tribunal-specific training, and supports ongoing professional development focused on procedural fairness, jurisprudence, case law, alternative dispute resolution, and more.
In one of the cases the watchdog flagged, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice’s Divisional Court, which hears appeals and judicial reviews of tribunal decisions, overturned a Landlord and Tenant Board ruling for being “procedurally unfair.” The court found that the tribunal did not give the tenants in the case the opportunity to provide evidence of rent payments that they’d paid.
In another case, an insurer asked the Licence Appeal Tribunal to change the dates of an in-person hearing because neither of the parties were available on the dates initially assigned by the tribunal. The tribunal denied the request. The Divisional Court overturned the tribunal’s ruling, noting that while it “rarely reviews an interlocutory order of an administrative tribunal” because “[a]dministrative tribunals have broad authority to regulate their own schedules,” the tribunal’s decision was “obviously wrong and unfair.”
In a third case, the Divisional Court said a Human Rights Tribunal ruling “did not reflect the heightened responsibility on it to appropriately address the circumstances” when it rejected a litigant’s filing because computer issues caused her to submit her filing 20 minutes late. The Divisional Court said in another decision that the same tribunal was “obviously unfair” when it declared that a case was abandoned after the litigant failed to respond to a single inquiry.
While some tribunals, including the Human Rights Tribunal, generally do not allow litigants to appeal decisions, litigants can ask the Divisional Court to review their cases in certain circumstances.
Cook says that based on his experience working at Ontario’s tribunals, such intervention in tribunal decisions seems to have grown more common.
However, the Tribunals Ontario spokesperson said that its data “indicate[s] a very high quality of decisions made by Tribunals Ontario adjudicators.”
The spokesperson said that from January 2021 to December 2024, “the Divisional Court upheld at an aggregate level 93.3% of the decisions appealed from the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, Landlord and Tenant Board, and Licence Appeal Tribunal, which are the tribunals that see the highest number of decisions appealed.”
The spokesperson also noted 11 of its 13 tribunals have no backlog.
“The reason why backlogs were eliminated at those tribunals is that our teams were laser focused on improving service delivery and making timely file closures a priority,” the spokesperson added.
