Journey · Rules 13 and 19A · CAD, NOID, RAS
Information from the public record, not legal advice. If one of these documents has arrived in your mail or inbox, the clock on your case is already running.
What this stage is
Between filing and any hearing, the Tribunal can test your case on paper. Three documents do this work, and in the record they end more cases than hearings do:
A Case Assessment Direction (CAD) directs you to clarify or fix something — often with a page limit and a deadline.
A Notice of Intent to Dismiss (NOID) says the Tribunal is planning to dismiss your application — usually for no apparent nexus, untimeliness, or jurisdiction — unless your written response changes its mind.
A Request for Additional Submissions (RAS) or summary-hearing direction asks why your case has a reasonable prospect of success.
Each one is the whole case, compressed. There is no hearing behind it if the response fails; the response is the hearing.
What the numbers say
This gate is where representation matters most, and the corpus is blunt about it. Among matters in our data: 89% of represented matters survived every procedural gate against 18% of unrepresented ones (at screening alone: 89% vs 39%) — and no represented applicant was dismissed for missing a deadline, while nearly half of unrepresented applicants were. Province-wide, Tribunal Watch Ontario found 96–97% of final decisions in 2023/24 were dismissals without any hearing. This page exists because these letters are where those dismissals happen.
The honest caveats: representation partly marks case strength (counsel choose viable cases), and the represented group in our corpus is small. The direction is consistent everywhere we can measure it.
What the decisions show a response must do
Answer the question asked. A NOID states the specific defect — late, no nexus, wrong forum. The response that survives addresses that defect with facts. Responses that re-argue the whole case, express the injustice at length, or attach everything ever written, fail. In the starkest example in the corpus, an applicant answering a CAD with a 10-page limit filed 92 pages; the application was dismissed, and the decision noted free legal help had been offered for exactly this task.
Respect the limit and the deadline literally. Page limits are enforced. Deadlines are enforced. An extension request before the deadline is routinely granted; an explanation after it frequently is not.
Facts, not adjectives. At this gate, "the officer's conduct was egregious and racist" does nothing. "The report says the call ended at 18:30; the dispatch log the respondent disclosed says 21:04" does everything. The record shows documents beating narratives at every level of this system.
Get one day of help. This is the single moment where brief, unbundled legal help — a lawyer or paralegal reviewing your draft response — changes trajectories. It is what summary advice is for. The Human Rights Legal Support Centre, the Law Society Referral Service's free half-hour, or a paralegal hired for this one document are all built for exactly this.
What we can't tell you
How many CADs and NOIDs issue per year, and what fraction of responses succeed — the Tribunal's system codes it; nothing publishes it. Request in preparation. FOI Tracker.
Next: Abandonment
Published in good faith from public records as fair comment on matters of public interest. Believed accurate at the review date; errors will be corrected and logged on notice. Information, not legal advice; no lawyer-client relationship is created.