What we hold, and what we don't
At the Human Rights Tribunal
57 published decisions, 2009–2026, naming the service, its board or its association. 65% name the Board rather than the Service. Thirty distinct applicant name-strings appear; the three most frequent account for a third of all decisions, so this record is concentrated, not diffuse.
Decisions per year. 2025 (orange) produced 15 — more than the six years 2016–2021 combined.
The 2025 spike
Seven decisions were released across two days in June 2025 — seven different applicants, all naming the Board. Reporting from 2022 describes the Board as facing multiple human rights complaints filed by current and former members of the service; the timing is consistent with a linked group of those matters reaching decisions together. We have not read them, so we do not assert what they decided.
Population-adjusted, it is the province's outlier
Against a city population near 108,000, Thunder Bay's decision volume produces a per-resident rate roughly twice Toronto's. Three caveats travel with that: concentration (three name-strings, a third of decisions) inflates it; police jurisdictions do not map cleanly to census boundaries; and a decision count is not a complaint rate. It is a signal worth investigating, not a finding.
Oversight: two landmark 2018 findings
In December 2018, two reports landed in the same week. The Office of the Independent Police Review Director's Broken Trust, a two-year systemic review, found "significant deficiencies in sudden-death investigations involving Indigenous people that are due, in part, to racial stereotyping", and urged the service to reopen nine sudden-death cases involving Indigenous victims — one of 44 recommendations.
Days later, Senator Murray Sinclair reported on the Board itself, concluding it had "failed to recognize and address the clear and indisputable pattern of violence and systemic racism against Indigenous people in Thunder Bay", and that its inaction amounted to "willful blindness". The report carried 32 recommendations and led to the temporary dissolution of the board and appointment of an administrator. These were "Canada's first-ever findings of anti-Indigenous systemic racism in a police service and its board".
A nine-member expert panel reporting in 2023 built on those recommendations and called for urgent action, stating that "status quo and quick fixes are no longer tenable".
The board chair who became an applicant
In December 2019 the reconstituted board named former Fort William First Nation Chief Georjann Morriseau as chair. Within months, "the service Morriseau was appointed to lead was investigating her, a probe that became criminal and resulted in the arrests of the police chief and the service's lawyer". The investigation into her was transferred to the OPP, which found no grounds for charges.
Between October 2021 and August 2022 she filed five HRTO applications alleging discrimination on race and ethnic origin, and reprisal. In October 2025 the Tribunal dismissed the discrimination allegations as outside its jurisdiction while allowing reprisal allegations to continue. In a decision dated June 2, 2026, the last two were deemed abandoned — she was not present when the Tribunal convened a summary hearing and had not sought an adjournment.
Sources: APTN News (Oct 2025); TBNewswatch (June 2026); Ricochet Media (2026). Characterizations are attributed to those reports.
In the courts
Former chief Sylvie Hauth and former in-house counsel Holly Walbourne were charged in April 2024 following an OPP investigation, in connection with the Morriseau matter. Walbourne's trial ran in April 2026: she was acquitted of one charge on April 17 as the Crown rested — no evidence had been presented on it — and found not guilty of the remaining charges on April 24, the judge not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that any false statement was intentional. Hauth's case was severed after a medical delay; on May 5, 2026 the Crown confirmed it will proceed to trial on fewer counts, with dates not yet set. Charges against her remain active and unproven. Separately, in May 2026 a sergeant of the service was convicted and sentenced to three years for obstruction and breach of trust arising from the 2020 warrantless-entry incident that two fellow officers had reported up the chain.
What we would need next
- Done — all 57 read: Case Study 02.
- Applications filed per year naming this service, and their disposition categories — Tribunals Ontario data, not public.
- Implementation status of the 44 Broken Trust and 32 Sinclair recommendations, verified rather than self-reported.
- Board legal spend and settlement aggregates.
These sit in our access-request program, in preparation. See the The missing layer.