The province-wide figure
Roughly a third of those final dismissals are jurisdictional; most of the rest are abandonments. Tribunal Watch Ontario's analysis makes the connection our own record shows applicant by applicant: many abandonment findings follow a request for legal submissions on jurisdiction that a self-represented applicant may simply not understand, and so does not answer.
The Divisional Court pushed back — Bokhari
In February 2026 the Divisional Court held the Tribunal's screening approach unreasonable. The significance is procedural and large: for years the Tribunal had been dismissing at the threshold on a standard harder than the settled test, which asks only whether it is plain and obvious that jurisdiction is absent. Thousands of cases were disposed of by a process a court has now ruled was wrong.
Tribunal Watch Ontario's three asks following that ruling: amend the rules to restore the plain-and-obvious test and train all adjudicators; fund human-rights experts to review cases dismissed for supposed lack of jurisdiction and decide which should be reconsidered; and appoint a qualified auditor to review all HRTO practices and procedures for Code compliance.
A second appellate correction landed in November 2025, when judges held the Tribunal erred in dismissing a former Member of Parliament's racial-discrimination complaint against Hamilton police — a jurisdictional dismissal of exactly the kind at issue in Bokhari, in exactly the subject area this site documents.
The 2019 consolidation — the change underneath everything
In 2019 twelve of Ontario's tribunals, the HRTO among them, were folded into a single umbrella entity, Tribunals Ontario. Backlogs ballooned afterwards. The clearest measure is the Landlord and Tenant Board, whose average backlog had been under 14,000 cases before consolidation and stood at 53,030 at the end of the 2023–24 fiscal year — a reduction of twenty-seven cases from the year before.
Tribunal Watch — whose members include former HRTO adjudicators and administrative-justice experts — has flagged both the backlog and the reporting around it. Tribunals Ontario's annual report included figures from outside the fiscal year it covered, showing a fall to 46,632 by July; the watchdog called that a very unusual move and noted the report does not explain how thousands of cases cleared in four months after twenty-seven cleared in a year.
A legislative response exists but has not passed: Bill 179, the Fewer Backlogs and Less Partisan Tribunals Act, would create an independent Adjudicative Tribunals Justice Council to oversee appointments, operations and severance, with a chair selected by all parties and half its members chosen by independent institutions including the Law Society. Its premise is the one this site documents from the other end: after 2018 the province declined to reappoint many experienced adjudicators and left the positions vacant, draining the leadership and institutional memory that had run the system.
The cases that made the news
| Date | What happened | Why it belongs here |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 2025 | A blind St. Catharines man awarded $28,000 after a discriminatory hiring process — and a years-long wait. | A remedy, and the wait that preceded it: both halves are the story. |
| Nov 2025 | Judges held the Tribunal erred in dismissing a former MP's discrimination complaint against Hamilton police. | Appellate correction of a jurisdictional dismissal — police respondent, Bokhari pattern. |
| Aug 2025 | A Windsor police constable injured on duty filed a $3.8M HRTO discrimination and harassment complaint. | The insider docket, outside Thunder Bay: officers using the Tribunal against their own service is not a northern anomaly. |
| Jun 2024 | A woman sexually assaulted at work waited six years for the Tribunal to schedule a hearing. | Delay measured in the only unit that matters — one person's life. |
| Mar 2023 | Backlogged tribunals reported as creating distress for Ontarians waiting months or years to be heard. | The consolidation's human cost, documented contemporaneously. |
Sources: CBC News; CTV News; Law Times; Tribunal Watch Ontario analyses of Tribunals Ontario annual reports. Headlines are summarized in our own words and linked from the live page; figures are attributed to the analysis that produced them.
What this page is for
Two case studies cannot prove a province. This page is where the province-wide evidence lives — produced by people better placed than us to obtain it, chiefly Tribunal Watch Ontario, a non-partisan group including retired adjudicators and counsel that has monitored this system since 2020. Our contribution is the layer beneath their aggregates: respondent-level relational data, read decision by decision, joined to court records. Where their numbers and ours disagree, we will say so here.