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.
Why nine months and not twelve: this is the reporting window in the Tribunal's own published figures analysed by Tribunal Watch Ontario — the latest statistics available at the time of that analysis. It is not a sample we chose, and it is not annualised anywhere on this site. At the same rate a full year would produce roughly 2,660 final decisions and about 2,580 dismissals without a hearing, but we do not publish that figure because the Tribunal has not published the fourth quarter. The percentage — 96.8% — is unaffected by the window length.
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.
The coverage record
Ontario's tribunal crisis has been reported steadily since 2022, largely because Tribunal Watch Ontario — a non-partisan group including retired adjudicators and counsel — has kept producing the analysis. This is the paper trail.
| Date | Outlet | What it reported |
|---|---|---|
| Nov 2024 | Toronto Region Real Estate Board | Breaking the Backlog — a report on restoring fairness at the Landlord and Tenant Board |
| Nov 2024 | Law Times | The human rights tribunal is reducing its backlog through onerous filing requirements, the watchdog says |
| Nov 2024 | The Globe and Mail | The tribunal dismisses 93% of cases |
| Nov 2024 | CBC — Ontario Today | A phone-in asking listeners how the Human Rights Tribunal is working for them |
| Oct 2024 | Law Times | Legal-spending cuts by the Human Rights Legal Support Centre are hurting litigants, lawyers say |
| Jun 2024 | CBC | A woman waited six years for a human rights hearing |
| Jun 2024 | CBC — Here and Now | Tribunal Watch Ontario is sounding the alarm |
| Mar 2024 | Toronto Star (editorial) | Under Doug Ford, Ontario's tribunals are under severe attack |
| Feb 2024 | Toronto Star | Partisan appointments have left 53,000 tenants and landlords waiting |
| Feb 2024 | The Trillium | Insiders say the Ontario Land Tribunal is broken |
| Oct 2023 | Law360 Canada | Oversight of government appointments to tribunals has become a farce |
| Oct 2023 | Investigative Journalism Foundation | Data analysis finding the Premier appoints Conservative insiders to "independent" tribunals; opposition condemns political meddling in the appointments process |
| Mar 2023 | CBC News | Backlogged tribunals creating distress for Ontarians waiting months or years |
| Jan 2023 | CBC Radio (Ontario Today, Metro Morning) | Tribunal Watch on HRTO delays — justice delayed is justice denied |
| Jan 2023 | Toronto Star | Ontarians' human rights are at risk because the system designed to protect them is broken |
| Dec 2022 | Tribunal Watch Ontario | News release: Access to Justice Denied |
| Dec 2022 | Toronto Star (Martin Regg Cohn) | Unqualified party loyalists appointed to fill key tribunal spots |
Headlines summarized in our own words from the outlets named. Where our figures and theirs differ — the Globe reported 93% in 2024; the 2025 figures give 96.8% — both are correct for their periods, and the direction is the same.
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.