Home · The Record · What the statute actually says

The Record · data governance · reviewed August 2026

Are tribunal records public? What the statute says

Ontario tribunals decline to compile or aggregate their own records, and the reason usually given is the statute. So we read the statute. The Tribunal Adjudicative Records Act, 2019 expressly makes "a register of proceedings before a tribunal" a public adjudicative record — one the tribunal shall make available. That is not our reading of the purpose. It is item 8 of the list.

The list, verbatim

Section 1(2) defines what counts as an adjudicative record. Nine items. These are the operative ones:

1. An application or other document by which a proceeding before a tribunal is commenced.
6. A decision or an order made by a tribunal and any reasons for the decision or order.
7. A docket or schedule of hearings of a tribunal.
8. A register of proceedings before a tribunal.

And s. 2(1): "A tribunal shall make those adjudicative records in its possession that relate to proceedings commenced on or after the day this section comes into force available to the public."

Read together, those provisions say the applications, the docket and the register are public records the tribunal is obliged to disclose. A register of proceedings is precisely the thing that answers "how many applications were filed, and what happened to them" — the question this entire site exists because nobody will answer.

Four restrictions that are real, and are in the text

1 · The Act only applies forward from July 2019

Section 2(1) covers records relating to "proceedings commenced on or after the day this section comes into force." Everything filed before then sits outside the access duty entirely. The corpora on this site begin in 2009. Most of what we study is not covered by the presumptive access right at all.

2 · Mediation is excluded by statute

Section 1(3) removes from the definition "[r]ecords related to any attempt to resolve a matter in a proceeding before a tribunal by means of an alternative dispute resolution mechanism, unless the record forms part of a decision or an order."

This is the settlement-invisibility problem, written into law. Mediation is where most matters end. The statute makes those records non-adjudicative, and therefore outside the access right — while FIPPA has separately been switched off for adjudicative records altogether. Settlements are not hidden by practice. They are excluded by drafting.

3 · Tribunals may charge fees, subject only to a minister

Section 4: a tribunal "may, subject to the approval of the minister responsible… set and charge fees for providing access to adjudicative records." There is no cap, no fee-waiver scheme in the Act, and no independent oversight of the fee level.

4 · The access rules escape regulatory scrutiny

Section 3(1) lets a tribunal make its own rules "governing procedures for providing access." Section 3(2) then provides that Part III (Regulations) of the Legislation Act, 2006 does not apply to those rules. They are not regulations. They do not go through the regulatory process. The tribunal writes the access rules for its own records, and the ordinary scrutiny that applies to regulations is switched off.

And the provision that removed the appeal

The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, s. 65(16), retrieved verbatim: "This Act does not apply to adjudicative records, within the meaning of the Tribunal Adjudicative Records Act, 2019."

That single sentence is what distinguishes tribunal records from every other public record in Ontario. Ask a police service for records and a refusal can be appealed to the Information and Privacy Commissioner, with enforceable timelines and fee controls. Ask a tribunal for its adjudicative records and none of that machinery exists, because FIPPA has been disapplied. The tribunal decides access, under rules it wrote itself, which are not regulations, with fees it sets, and no independent appeal.

This is the honest answer to "why is Ontario tribunal data harder to get than police data?" Not because the information is more sensitive. Because the oversight was removed. How that happened, and what a court had just ordered.

So what can actually be asked for

Reading the statute rather than the practice changes the shape of a request. On the face of the Act:

  • A register of proceedings is an adjudicative record (s. 1(2) item 8) that the tribunal shall make public (s. 2(1)) for proceedings commenced from July 2019 onward. A request framed as "provide the register of proceedings" is a request for a named statutory record — not a request to create a new compilation.
  • A docket or schedule of hearings is item 7, on the same footing.
  • Applications — the documents commencing proceedings — are item 1.
  • What cannot be obtained this way: anything pre-July-2019, and anything from mediation.

This is analysis of statutory text retrieved from the A2AJ open legal corpus, not legal advice, and not a prediction about how any request will be answered. A tribunal may take a different view of what its register comprises, or whether it holds one in the form requested. The answer — whatever it is — is publishable, and that is the point. Our access requests are being redrafted around the statutory language rather than around a description of the data we want.

Why we checked

Because the alternative was guessing. It would have been easy to write that a 2019 government restricted tribunal data, and it would have sounded right. The statute says something more specific and more useful: the presumptive access right is real, the register is expressly listed, and what was removed was the enforcement machinery — the Commissioner, the timelines, the fee controls and the appeal. That is a narrower claim, it is checkable against the text, and it points at a fix.