EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a new Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Some Ontarians have been living with violence and harassment for years and others were plunged into debt as the provincial tribunal dedicated to landlord and tenant disputes has become increasingly backlogged and broken, the province's ombudsman has found.
The report, "Administrative Justice Delayed, Fairness Denied," details a bureaucratic nightmare at the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB), where hearings that used to be scheduled within days are now heard months later.
"As of February 2023, landlord applications were generally being scheduled for hearing within six to nine months of receipt, and tenant applications could take up to two years to be scheduled," ombudsman Paul Dubé found.
In the meantime, some tenants have been living in mouldy apartments without heat, or facing harassment from their landlords, the ombudsman heard over the course of more than 4,000 interviews.
But "there was no monopoly on hardship" for the tenants, he said.
Some small landlords were plunged into debt, with one who'd had to move into his car and another into a homeless shelter, because the process of kicking out tenants for non-payment of rent had dragged on and on.
In one case, a woman with terminal cancer who lived in her basement tried to evict the tenants who rented upstairs so she could die there in peace spent her final months with tenants who threatened her with death, sexually harassed her daughter, blasted music, shouted obscenities, and didn't pay rent — and she died before the case could be resolved.
"While they waited for hearings about tenants who are abusive, caused damage or refused to pay rent, many were trapped in the board's seemingly endless queue, no matter how urgent their situation," the report said. "Some were sent to the back of the line because of errors in their applications. Others were left in limbo because their adjudicator had too many cases or might have just left the board."
The damming report places the blame on three main causes: the government's public appointment process, technological problems, and the pandemic.
At the outset of the investigation in the fall of 2019, the ombudsman was told the problems were primarily a shortage of board members to adjudicate disputes, related to the 2018 election. The previous Liberal government had limited appointments prior to the election, following the caretaker convention and the new Progressive Conservative government took time to get up to speed on the appointment process.
While the ombudsman noted his office received complaints "that political considerations might influence these appointments," he said that was out of his scope to investigate.
In 2020, the citizen group Tribunals Watch noted the number of adjudicators had fallen by 13 full-time positions, from 44 to 31. The group believed the Ford government was ditching experienced, neutral, genuinely non-partisan adjudicators because it saw them as tainted by their association with the defeated Liberal government, a board member told the Star. It also slammed the appointment of lawyer and former Conservative candidate Sean Weir as the executive chair of Tribunals Ontario, as a patronage post for an unqualified candidate.
The appointment process takes, in general, three to five months, with duplicative vetting by Tribunals Ontario, the Ministry of the Attorney General, and, in some cases, additional vetting by the minister and premier's offices, which also researched candidates, the ombudsman found.
At one point the province moved to a system where appointments were made for only one year, allowing for more "flexibility" and bypassing a requirement for review by a legislative committee — a strategy that was eventually abandoned after it caused "uncertainty and morale issues amongst members."
The ombudsman's report found high turnover contributes to the chaos of the board: when a member leaves, any of their cases that were not resolved must be reheard by another member, forcing some applicants to start the beginning of the lengthy process all over again and, in the case of one applicant, to go through it twice.
In April, the government announced it will spend $6.5 million to appoint an additional 40 adjudicators and hire five staff to the LTB, more than doubling the number of full-time adjudicators.
The ombudsman also detailed a technological nightmare. At the outset of his investigation in 2019, the LTB was using an outdated system from 2008 with problems the former executive director of Tribunals Ontario described as "catastrophic" and "a huge reputational risk" while the government was developing a new system. While that new system was almost ready by February 2019, it wasn't implemented. The government had created the new Tribunals Ontario agency to oversee a group of 13 administrative tribunals, and it wanted a system that could be applied to all of its tribunals, which was approved two years later.
It was partially launched in July 2021 with a litany of bugs and the LTB is still in the process of rolling out new features and moving off of the legacy system, the ombudsman found.
The ombudsman found that the pandemic, along with the human resources and technological problems, created the perfect storm. During the pandemic, hearings were permanently made virtual. Dubé said he couldn't tell if it made the process any more efficient than in-person hearings.
"For some people, it made things a little bit more easy or accessible, but then for a lot of people, it just made a hearing ... inaccessible because they didn't have access to technology or computer," he said, adding that the board set up help for some people in those circumstances, but it was "fraught with glitches and problems."
The ombudsman made 61 recommendations, some of which would require amendments to the Residential Tenancies Act. A spokesperson for Attorney General Doug Downey did not commit to making those changes but said the report is being reviewed and highlighted the recent announcement of additional funding.
In a statement, the leadership of Tribunals Ontario said it will "continue to work with the Ombudsman’s Office and the Ministry of the Attorney General to address the report’s recommendations."
