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About

Independent Canadian public-interest research.

OnionSkin exists to answer one question that no public source answers: when a person enters a legal or administrative system, what outcomes become visible — and what outcomes disappear?

What we do

We take the records public bodies already publish — tribunal decisions, court files, oversight reports, budgets — read them completely rather than selectively, extract them into structured datasets, join them to what happened next, and publish both the findings and the data. Every figure carries its unit, its source and its review date.

Why "OnionSkin"

Onion-skin paper is what carbon copies were typed on: the thin sheet that proved what the original said. It is also what you get when you keep peeling a record apart — layers, each one thinner and closer to what actually happened.

What we will not publish

Success rates presented as merit rates. League tables without denominators. Untested allegations against named individuals. Any figure we cannot show the working for. The full list is on the Method page, along with our corrections policy and our rules on the use of AI.

Funding and independence

OnionSkin is non-commercial and carries no advertising, no sponsorship and no paywall. It has no institutional affiliation with any tribunal, police service, government body or law firm named in its work.

Standing on prior work

Province-wide analysis of tribunal dismissal and abandonment trends has been led since 2020 by Tribunal Watch Ontario. The 2012 Ontario Human Rights Review is our baseline for what this system looked like when it worked. Our contribution is respondent-level relational data and court-record joins.

Editorial responsibility and a published correspondence address are being finalised and will appear here before any outreach campaign begins. Until then, Contact reaches us directly, and every correction is logged publicly on the Method page.