The left ledger: what changed
The direct-access transition. Commission files moved to a new tribunal system; the one-year clock ran during the switch; applicants were timed out in the handover (see S.M., our earliest Durham casualty).
Summary hearings created. A filter — but one with a hearing in it.
The adjudicator collapse. Appointments expired en masse and were not renewed; the experienced complement drained. The backlog this created became the stated justification for nearly everything below.
The triple change. Tribunals Ontario absorbed the cluster; legal aid cut ~30% province-wide, with HRLSC mediation-representation funding ended March 31 — applicants began negotiating against institutional counsel alone; and TARA (below).
The pandemic shift. Electronic hearings made default, then permanent; decision output halved for three years; digital-first filing arrived with the divide it brings.
Two quiet tightenings. The screening test hardened — disclosed only later, held unlawful by the Divisional Court in Bokhari (Feb 2026); and the JRPA was amended to impose a 30-day judicial-review deadline where none had existed — finality for institutions, a trap for the self-represented.
The practice direction. Preliminary merits review on written filings formalized; NOIDs and CADs became the closing instruments.
April: the oversight reorganization (see the transition page) — the public policy-complaint route abolished. October: the rules package — summary hearings eliminated after fourteen years; expedited-hearing rule deleted. Filters without hearings replaced filters with them.
Mandatory mediation. Applicant absence can end the case; a missed post-mediation form can close it without further notice; respondent absence merely limits later participation.
Bill 97. Response deadlines to 45 business days; ministers' offices excluded from FOI retroactively — extinguishing the court-ordered production of the Premier's phone records after six years of litigation; personal information banks removed from the statute.
TARA — the full story
In Toronto Star v. AG Ontario, 2018 ONSC 2586, the Superior Court held that FIPPA's treatment of tribunal adjudicative records violated the Charter: the presumption of non-disclosure of personal information, and the delays built into the FOI process, infringed s. 2(b)'s open-court guarantee. The press had won the constitutional point: tribunal records are court-like records the public is presumptively entitled to see. The government's legislative response was the Tribunal Adjudicative Records Act, 2019 — which did create a presumptive access right, and simultaneously removed adjudicative records from FIPPA entirely (s. 65(16)). What left with FIPPA: the IPC's appeal jurisdiction, enforceable timelines, fee controls, and any right to compelled searches or aggregate data. What arrived with TARA: per-file requests to the tribunal itself, tribunal-issued confidentiality orders, and the official position that the tribunal "cannot extract, compile or aggregate" — the wall this project's FOI architecture is built around.
The right ledger: where it went
- Fighting records orders — two sagas, kept distinct. The mandate letters: media sought the Premier's mandate letters in 2018; the IPC ordered disclosure; the government litigated through Divisional Court, the Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court (decided 2024) — and won there, lawfully, at multi-year public expense. The phone records: Greenbelt-era orders for the Premier's phone records (~2023 onward) were headed the other way — until Bill 97 (Feb 2026) retroactively excluded ministers' records, extinguishing the orders rather than complying with them. One fight ended in a court ruling; the other ended in a law change. Legal costs of both: FOI target.
- Resisting the Durham investigation. Approximately $2 million in reported legal expenses by DRPS and its board resisting the oversight investigation, plus a court-ordered $65,000 payable to the OCPC — both ultimately taxpayer-funded; the investigation's own report describes "an unjustified significant expenditure of taxpayer funds in resisting and obstructing a lawful investigation." The report itself: withheld from publication. (Verified against the original CBC reporting, November 2025.)
- Defending the Thunder Bay crisis. External counsel across a dozen concurrent HRTO matters, criminal defence proceedings for senior leadership, administrator costs, and expert-panel processes — the litigation footprint of a governance collapse, borne by a city of 110,000. Quantification via FOI.
- The WSIB fight against members. Durham officers' PTSD findings reportedly appealed by the service as a pattern. Cost of appeals: FOI target. Downstream cost visible at Thunder Bay: years of tribunal litigation by injured members.
- The expansion asks. Durham's $1.1B ten-year plan (∼10% property-tax impact, 670+ new positions), proposed by the same institutions whose accountability resistance appears above. Presented beside, not netted against. The 2027 kit.
A draft row on provincial discretionary spending (amenity procurement, aircraft, event costs) was removed at verification: this ledger's force depends on every number surviving scrutiny, and those items are not yet sourced to primary documents. They return if and when they are.