What we count, and what we can't
Every figure is extracted from the four corners of a published decision and carries a confidence score: stated verbatim, unambiguous inference, or inferred from an index. Nothing is imputed — a silent field is recorded as silent, never as a zero.
Rates are calculated by matter — one person's case, verified by HRTO file number — not by decision. One matter can produce a dozen decisions, and counting decisions overweights the most litigated files. Where only an index is available (no file numbers on its face), we count decisions and say so.
Published decisions are a survivorship sample. Matters that settle or are withdrawn may produce no public document, so every rate we publish is a rate among adjudicated matters. An exit is not a verdict.
The Visibility Gap
The core research question: when a person enters a legal or administrative system, what outcomes become visible — and what outcomes disappear? Public decisions show the cases that reach a formal conclusion; they reveal far less about the cases that exit earlier through settlement, withdrawal, procedural dismissal, or outcomes that never generate published reasons. Quantifying that gap — and closing it through access requests — is the project.
What we refuse to publish
- Success rates as merit rates. The record cannot distinguish "claim lacked merit" from "claimant lacked capacity to continue."
- Raw-count league tables of respondents. Counts without population and calls-for-service denominators, and without matter-level identity data, mislead.
- Settlement claims without the settlement flag data. Privilege protects terms; the facts we cite are counts, and we do not have them yet.
- Untested allegations against named individuals. Institutions and patterns, not people; findings, not accusations.
How we cite
Every factual claim on this site should be traceable to a document you can open. Our convention:
- Decisions are cited by neutral citation (Briggs v. Durham (Police Services Board), 2022 ONCA 823) so they can be found on CanLII or the tribunal's own site.
- Statutes are cited by name and section.
- Figures we produced carry their unit, their corpus and their coding source in a note directly under the chart — never in a separate methodology page you have to hunt for.
- Figures others produced are attributed in the sentence that uses them, with a numbered source at the foot of the page linking to the original.
- ◇ marks a claim we have not finished verifying. It is not decoration. Where you see it, treat the number as provisional.
- Characterisations by others — a watchdog's assessment, a government's stated reason — are quoted as theirs and not adopted as ours.
Where a page rests substantially on outside sources, it ends with a numbered Sources section. Pages built from our own corpora carry their method in the source line instead.
Corrections
When something we have published is wrong, we fix it in place, mark what changed, and date it. We do not quietly edit; we do not remove; we do not make you hunt for what moved. Anyone — including an institution we have written about — can tell us, and a correction does not require agreement about anything else.
Two things this policy is not. It is not a running diary of every draft we revised before publishing: readers never saw that material, and logging it would be noise dressed as rigour. And it is not a substitute for getting things right the first time — every figure is joined to court records and re-derived from the data before it ships, precisely so that this section stays short.
One structural risk is worth naming, because it is the failure mode this project is built against: a tribunal does not annotate its own decisions when a court later sets them aside. A tribunal-only dataset therefore reports some outcomes backwards. Every outcome we publish is joined to subsequent court records before it ships, and a validation rule blocks any figure that has not been.
AI, and its limits here
AI assists extraction from decisions into the schema (confidence-scored, human-verified before publication), entity-resolution candidates, and drafting. It never produces outcome predictions for individuals, personalized legal guidance, or unreviewed published text.
Class-action indicators — an analytical schema
Applied to every documented pattern, marked clearly as research analysis, not legal advice: pattern_commonality (does one institutional practice — policy, code, template, clause — recur across affected persons? e.g., settlement non-disparagement templates; PTSD-finding appeals as reported blanket practice; unfounded coding) · class_size_signal (countable affected population from records) · evidence_base (institutional documents proving the practice — self-generated records beat testimony, this site's founding insight inverted to plaintiffs' benefit) · precedent_track (nearest certified/settled analogue: the G20 mass-detention class; profiling and strip-search certifications) · limitation_horizon (the clock, per claim type — because Chookomolin) · venue_logic (why class/civil rather than, or alongside, individual Code applications: the s. 35 vacancy, the personal-respondent removal practice, and the attrition documented across this site are themselves the argument that individual process cannot reach systemic conduct).
First three patterns to score: the Durham PTSD/WSIB appeals practice; settlement-silencing clause use; Thunder Bay Indigenous service-docket attrition.
Standing on prior work
Province-wide analysis of HRTO dismissal rates, abandonment trends and annual-report gaps has been led since 2020 by Tribunal Watch Ontario, a non-partisan group of retired adjudicators, counsel and administrative-justice experts. OnionSkin's respondent-level relational data and court-record joins build on the ground their aggregate work established. The 2012 Ontario Human Rights Review (Pinto) is our baseline for what this system looked like when it worked — and the source of a still-unimplemented recommendation to publish anonymized settlement-outcome data.