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The Record · s. 35 · modified 6 Aug 2026

The systemic claim nobody is allowed to bring

Ontario's Human Rights Code contains a power designed for exactly one situation: discrimination too systemic for any single victim's case to capture. Section 35 lets the Ontario Human Rights Commission itself apply to the Tribunal, in the public interest. Section 31 lets it investigate — enter premises, compel documents, question witnesses — and publish.

How the architecture performs in practice

In March 2025, the Tribunal dismissed a father's application about his son's death investigation — filed in 2018, in the city where two oversight bodies had just documented systemic racism in exactly those investigations — because s. 34 limits applications to people asserting their own rights: only the Commission can bring public-interest applications. The Tribunal's statement of law is correct. It is also, functionally, a description of a locked door: the Commission has essentially never used s. 35 against a police service in the direct-access era.

So the individual is the wrong applicant, and the right applicant does not apply. The systemic claim is not losing — it is unbrought, permanently, by design. The case that proves it: Chookomolin, seven years pending before the threshold ruling issued, the civil limitation expiring in the queue.

And the case is not only about civilians

The public-interest argument at Thunder Bay is usually framed around Indigenous civilians and death investigations, because that is where the 2018 findings landed. The tribunal record adds a second dimension the oversight reports never examined: 62% of the applications against that service came from inside the institution — twenty-six filed by eleven serving or former members, and five by the chair of its own oversight board — with reprisal the most-pleaded ground in the entire corpus, and no merits hearing on any path in seventeen years. A systemic inquiry that looked at both the service delivered to the public and the workplace inside the service would be examining one institution, not two.

The proof the claim was never unwinnable

In Woodgate et al. v. RCMP, 2026 CHRT 15, the federal tribunal heard the same claim-type on its merits — discriminatory police investigation, Indigenous complainants — because the federal Act gives individuals standing and its Commission litigated beside them. Partially substantiated; compensation and a systemic training order followed. The Ontario version of that claim was dismissed at the threshold. The full comparison.

What the Commission can still do — and what changed in 2008

The Commission was not abolished and its powers were not removed. What ended on June 30, 2008 was the model in which the Commission received, investigated and carried every individual complaint to a Board of Inquiry as a party. That is why the leading systemic case in Ontario is captioned Ontario Human Rights Commission v. Ontario (Correctional Services) — before direct access, the Commission was the applicant of record in an individual's case.

Under the current Code the Commission retains three distinct powers, and it uses them rarely rather than never:

  • Section 35 — its own application. The Commission may file directly with the Tribunal in the public interest. It then has the same role as an applicant: leading evidence, arguing remedy. But individual remedies, including compensation, are not available in a Commission-initiated application. It represents the public interest, not a person.
  • Section 37 — intervention in someone else's application. As a full party where the applicant consents, or on terms the Tribunal sets where they do not. Participation can include calling evidence, cross-examining and making submissions. This is a live power and the Commission has used it against police — it intervened in Phipps, the racial-profiling case that reached the Court of Appeal.
  • Sections 30–31 — inquiries. The power behind the Toronto Police Service inquiry, which compelled SIU files and produced the figures on the racial profiling page.
And it sees everything. The Commission has the right to be informed of applications before the Tribunal and receives copies of all applications and responses. It has therefore received every application in both police corpora on this site. The question this page asks is not whether the Commission knows. It is what follows from knowing.

So the honest framing is two doors of different kinds. Routine carriage of an individual's complaint ended in 2008 — after which the individual stands alone unless the Commission chooses to intervene. Section 35 remains open and available, and has not been used against a police service in the direct-access era. And even if it were, a s. 35 application could not have compensated the father in Chookomolin, because individual remedies are unavailable in it. The systemic door and the individual door are separate, and neither one is currently carrying these claims.

◇ Whether Commission carriage rather than the adjudicator's own approach produced McKinnon's remedial structure is being verified against the decision text. Sources: OHRC Litigation and Inquiry Strategy; Code ss. 30–31, 35, 37.

What fills the gap now

Nothing adjudicative. Oversight bodies (LECA, the Inspector General) can find and recommend but not award Code remedies; coroner's inquests recommend; media documents. Only s. 35 converts systemic findings into enforceable Code orders — which is why this page exists alongside a formal request to the Commission, published below, with its answer to follow, whatever it is.

The measurables this page will carry

  • Count of s. 35 applications filed since June 30, 2008, by respondent sector (compiling via Commission annual reports and tribunal records requests).
  • Count of s. 31 inquiries, same period.
  • The Commission's response to the Thunder Bay request, in full, dated.

The request to the Commission — full text

Status: In preparation — drafted; delivery pending. Published here in advance so the ask is on the record before the answer.

To the Chief Commissioner, Ontario Human Rights Commission: that the Commission exercise, in respect of the Thunder Bay Police Service and its Board, one of the two public-interest powers the Legislature reserved to it alone: (1) an application to the HRTO under s. 35 of the Code, in the Commission's own name, addressing systemic discrimination against Indigenous people in the delivery of policing services; or, in the alternative, (2) an inquiry under s. 31, with published findings, into the same subject matter.

The letter's core: on March 14, 2025, the Tribunal dismissed Chookomolin v. Thunder Bay Police Service, 2025 HRTO 657 — a father's application alleging that the investigation into his son Marlan's June 2017 death was deficient by reason of systemic racism — for lack of standing, holding that public-interest claims of this kind may be brought only by the Commission. The application had been pending approximately seven years before that threshold ruling; the civil limitation period expired during the wait. The consequence is structural, not case-specific: the individuals with the deepest grievances — bereaved families — are, as a matter of law, the wrong applicants; and the body that is the right applicant has not applied.

And the Commission would not begin an investigation; it would inherit one: Broken Trust (OIPRD, December 2018 — racially deficient death and missing-person investigations, nine reinvestigations ordered, 44 recommendations); the Sinclair report (OCPC, December 2018 — the Board's failure found to constitute an emergency, an administrator appointed); and the governance record 2019–2026 documented across this site.