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 — the hinge year. Twelve tribunals, the HRTO among them, were consolidated under a single umbrella entity, Tribunals Ontario. Backlogs ballooned afterwards and have not recovered: the Landlord and Tenant Board's average backlog had been under 14,000 cases before consolidation and stood at 53,030 at the end of 2023–24. In the same year, legal aid was cut ~30% province-wide and HRLSC mediation-representation funding ended March 31 — applicants began negotiating against institutional counsel alone. And TARA (below). The province-wide numbers.
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 from "plain and obvious" — disclosed only later, held unreasonable by the Divisional Court in Bokhari (Feb 2026), by which time 676 files in nine months of 2025 alone had been dismissed for supposed lack of jurisdiction; 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.