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The Record · individual respondents · modified 6 Aug 2026

Naming individual officers in HRTO applications

People name the officers who harmed them. The system unnames them. Under the Tribunal's settled practice, where the institution accepts liability and can satisfy any remedy, individually named respondents are removed as parties — routinely, on the institution's motion, early.

11
members of the Thunder Bay command structure named across the 2025 cluster — chief, deputy, counsel, supervisors — all removed (text-verified)
→0
provisional finding for municipal and regional services only: named respondents surviving to final disposition. Provincial respondents differ — see Prothero below

Correction, August 2026. An earlier version of this page said that no officer, chief or police counsel in our corpus had faced a personal Code finding. That claim was too broad and is withdrawn. A counter-example exists: in Prothero v. Ontario (Community Safety and Correctional Services), 2016 HRTO 1481, a named individual respondent was ordered to pay $2,500 personally and to complete Ontario Human Rights Commission training, alongside a $25,000 injury-to-dignity award against the OPP as employer. He was not removed from the style of cause.

The claim narrowed to what the record supports: in the municipal and regional police corpora we hold, no individually named respondent has faced a personal Code finding — every early Durham file naming officers, six in one 2010 file, resolved against institutional respondents only. Whether that pattern holds at the OPP and at provincial respondents is now an open question, and Prothero suggests it may not.

Why it matters

Removal is doctrinally tidy — the applicant loses no remedy in dollars. What is lost is attribution: the public record converts "Officer X did this" into "the institution did this," permanently. Meanwhile the reverse asymmetry operates without any rule at all: police databases retain civilians' unproven allegations, withdrawn charges, and "unfounded" files, and deploy them for years. (See the Records Guide on retrieving yours.)

The register — publication protocol

This page carries, first, the aggregate above: named-at-filing versus named-at-disposition, extended by service and year as coding completes. Second — only after independent legal review, and not before — a register drawn strictly from published decisions: name as it appears in the decision, citation, role, and the verbatim status line on every row (named as personal respondent at filing; removed as a party; allegations untested; no findings made against this individual). Nothing beyond the public record; nothing implied beyond the status line; corrections published in place.

Until that review concludes, the aggregate statistic is the publication. The register reports what the open-justice principle already made public — it simply declines to let procedure erase it.