Who Are HRTO Adjudicators? Appointments, Independence and Qualifications

On naming — a position we have revised

Our earlier line was that adjudicators should be reported only in aggregate and never named. That was too blunt, and the objection to it is strong: if a person is appointed without an open competition, holds office at the pleasure of the government that appointed them, and decides whether someone's claim of discrimination is heard at all, then their qualifications and their decision-making are matters of legitimate public interest. Anonymity in that situation does not protect independence. It protects opacity.

So the line has moved. What we will and will not do:

We will name who decided what. Every decision is published over a signature. Reporting that a named Vice-Chair decided a named case is reporting the public record, not exposing anyone.
We will publish appointment provenance and stated qualifications where they are on the public record — appointment date, term, prior professional background, and the process used.
We will publish concentration and disposition patterns per adjudicator, in neutral units, once the data exists to do it properly.
We will not publish rankings, grades, "toughest adjudicator" lists, or inferences about motive. Not out of deference — because a scoreboard invites the reader to attribute a systemic pattern to a personality, and every number on this site says the pattern is systemic.
We will apply the same standard we apply to police officers: named where a public record names them, described by what they did, never characterised beyond what the document supports.

The distinction that matters: naming an adjudicator to explain how the system works is accountability. Naming an adjudicator to explain why one case went badly is usually wrong, because in a system dismissing nearly 97% of matters without a hearing, the individual is not the variable.

How Ontario tribunal adjudicators are appointed

Adjudicators of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario are appointed by the Lieutenant Governor in Council on the recommendation of the Attorney General and Cabinet. They serve fixed terms. Reappointment is discretionary. There is no independent body between the government and the appointment, and none between the government and a decision not to reappoint.

That last point is the whole issue. A judge cannot be removed for deciding cases in a way a government dislikes. A tribunal adjudicator can simply not be reappointed, and no reason need be given.

What happened after 2018

Following the 2018 provincial election, the government declined to reappoint many experienced adjudicators and left their positions vacant. Noel Semple of the University of Windsor Faculty of Law, who advised on reform legislation, described the effect: "There were a whole lot of vacancies… More importantly, all the most experienced people who provided the leadership and institutional memory had been dismissed." He has also said the province followed up by appointing people connected to the governing party.

Brian Cook, coordinator of Tribunal Watch Ontario — a non-partisan organisation whose members include former adjudicators — put the principle at stake plainly: "Just like judicial independence is of paramount importance in our society, there should be similar protections for people appointed to adjudicative tribunals. Currently, the process is open to political abuse."

Then, in 2019, twelve tribunals including the HRTO were consolidated under a single umbrella, Tribunals Ontario. The backlog consequences are set out on the province-wide page.

The sequence matters. Experienced complement drained (2018–21) → consolidation (2019) → backlog → and the backlog then became the stated justification for the procedural filters that now end nearly 97% of matters without a hearing. The appointments crisis is upstream of everything else this site documents.

How concentrated is a docket, actually?

Measured across three institutional corpora on one pipeline:

Ontario corrections
484 decisions

74 adjudicators

Durham Regional Police
60 decisions

29 adjudicators

Thunder Bay Police
57 decisions

23 adjudicators

~6%

largest single-adjudicator share, Ontario corrections — 20 wrote exactly one decision; the top five together wrote 23%

10%

largest share, Durham

20%

largest share, Thunder Bay — one Vice-Chair on the modern docket

Concentration is a property of a docket, not of the tribunal. A ministry corpus spanning forty years spreads across seventy-four adjudicators with no one above about 6%. A single police service's modern docket runs one-fifth through one person. Neither figure is a criticism of anyone; both are facts about how work is assigned, and only the second raises a question worth asking.

Concentration in the police corpora

In the Thunder Bay corpus, the modern docket has been case-managed and decided substantially by a single Vice-Chair, sitting alone or presiding on panels. In the Durham corpus, six reconsideration requests were made and six refused — four decided by the same adjudicator who wrote the original decision, including one where the request alleged bias.

Nothing in either pattern breaches the Rules. Rule 26 does not require reassignment on reconsideration. That is the point. A system in which the author of a decision routinely reviews challenges to it, and in which one adjudicator owns a service's entire docket, produces consistency — and also produces a structural problem of perception in a small legal community where every institutional actor knows every other.

The modest reform this suggests: reassign reconsiderations to a different adjudicator by default, and mandatorily where bias is alleged. Cost: nil. It is the same shape of fix as the one-paragraph notice proposed on the CAD page.

The appointment record, from the government's own register

Ontario publishes every tribunal appointment — name, tribunal, position, appointment date and expiry — through the Public Appointments Secretariat.¹ We extracted the Human Rights Tribunal entries and measured them: 84 appointment rows covering 79 people — five people hold two HRTO appointments each, typically a member appointment followed by promotion to Vice-Chair.

Two people on the register predate the 2018 change of government. One is still serving.

of 79 people on the register were first appointed to the HRTO before the June 2018 election

of those two has a term still running — to March 2028

appointment rows dated 2024 alone, of 84 in total

The two are Romona Gananathan, appointed Full-Time Vice-Chair in September 2017 — two rows, full-time and part-time, both expiring September 2024, and the register marks her as no longer with Tribunals Ontario — and Elisabeth Campin, appointed a Part-Time Member in March 2018, three months before the election, on a ten-year term running to March 2028. Hers is the longest term in the HRTO register by a wide margin.

Rows by original appointment year: 2017 — 2 · 2018 — 1 · 2019 — none at all · 2020 — 5 · 2021 — 13 · 2022 — 10 · 2023 — 11 · 2024 — 38 · 2025 — 4.

The institutional-memory question, in the government's own numbers. Of 79 people currently on the HRTO register, one holds an appointment that predates the 2018 change of government and is still running. Commentators have attributed this directly — Noel Semple writes that the root cause of the tribunals' dysfunction was the decision to refuse reappointment to almost everyone hired before 2018;³ MPP Ted Hsu has said the landlord and tenant board, the HRTO and the social benefits tribunal lost a third of their adjudicators between 2018 and 2020.⁴ We publish the count and attribute the explanation.

What this figure is and is not. The register lists appointees as at the 2024–25 fiscal year. Anyone whose term ended earlier does not appear on it at all — so this is not a count of everyone who ever served, and it cannot by itself show how many were declined reappointment. It shows who is there now, and how recently they arrived.

Security of tenure has been cut from five years to two

Appointed 2017–2021
21 rows

5.0 yr median

Appointed 2024–2025
42 rows

2.0 yr median

Thirty-seven of the forty-two most recent HRTO appointment rows carry two-year terms. The longest term in the register — ten years — belongs to the March 2018 appointment above. The pattern is not subtle: as appointments have been renewed, their length has more than halved.

Why term length is the whole question. An adjudicator on a two-year term who wants to keep the job must be reappointed by the government within twenty-four months — and no reason need be given for declining. That is not an allegation about anyone's conduct; it is a description of the incentive structure the Legislature has left in place, and it is exactly what Bill 179 was drafted to address.

Two other features of the register

69%

of HRTO appointment rows are part-time — 58 of 84

42%

are cross-appointed to other Tribunals Ontario bodies — the landlord and tenant board, the licence appeal tribunal, the social benefits tribunal and others

Cross-appointment is how a fourteen-tribunal cluster staffs itself, and one person in the register holds simultaneous appointments to fourteen constituent tribunals. It also means human rights expertise is not necessarily what an HRTO adjudicator was appointed for — which matters, because the Human Rights Code requires a competitive selection process assessing experience, knowledge or training in human rights law, aptitude for impartial adjudication, and aptitude for the Tribunal's alternative procedures.²

Bill 179: what it would have done, and what happened to it

Bill 179, the Fewer Backlogs and Less Partisan Tribunals Act, 2024, was introduced on 25 March 2024 by Ted Hsu, Liberal MPP for Kingston and the Islands, working with three other Liberal MPPs. It was based on a draft by the late Ron Ellis, a former chair of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeals Tribunal and a long-standing scholar of tribunal independence. It was debated at second reading on 18 April 2024 and lost on the vote.⁴

What it proposed

An Adjudicative Tribunal Justice Council — a standing independent body to monitor tribunals, identify impediments, prepare recruitment plans, take proactive steps to fill vacancies, conduct inquiries and report to the Legislature.
A council the government would not control. Ten members: a chair; two retired judges of the Superior Court or Ontario Court of Justice; two appointed by the Society of Ontario Adjudicators and Regulators, each with five or more years in adjudicative tribunals; two non-lawyers appointed to reflect Ontario's linguistic duality, diversity and gender balance; and one appointed by the Association of Community Legal Clinics of Ontario.
A right of review against non-reappointment. Where the government declined to reappoint an adjudicator for a reason that would not constitute cause for dismissal — including where the tribunal's own chair had recommended reappointment — that adjudicator could appeal to the council.
Six months' advance notice. The Attorney General would have to give the council at least six months' written notice of any legislation, regulation or directive affecting adjudicative tribunals, and the council would give its opinion on the impact.
Council vetting of recruitment plans for tribunal members and chairs, and consequential amendments to the Adjudicative Tribunals Accountability, Governance and Appointments Act, 2009.

Why it matters even though it failed. Bill 179 is the clearest available statement of what a fix would look like, and it was drafted by people who run tribunals rather than by people who litigate in them. Its central mechanism — a review when a competent adjudicator recommended by their own chair is not reappointed — is aimed precisely at the pattern the appointment register shows. It was defeated at second reading, so none of it is law. The two-year terms remain two-year terms.

◇ Status verified to the defeat of the bill at second reading in April 2024. A private member's bill that fails at second reading is not carried forward; any revival would be a new bill. Check the Legislative Assembly's site for anything since.

What the watchdog says about leadership

Tribunal Watch Ontario — whose members include former adjudicators — reported in January 2024 that the position of HRTO Associate Chair, effectively the head of the tribunal, was vacant for the fifth time in five years.² Its assessment of the appointments made under the current government is direct: that the biographical information published by the Public Appointments Office indicates few of those appointed brought proven human rights law expertise or prior adjudication experience, and that the government has refused to reappoint many experienced human rights adjudicators.

It records that one recent Associate Chair had no background in human rights law, and that her predecessor left after a year to run as a federal candidate, having worked as a jewellery designer for the thirteen years before appointment.

Its stated consequence connects directly to every figure on this site: the number of final merit decisions released by the HRTO has fallen by more than 50%, while early-stage dismissals reached unprecedented levels and abandonments rose sharply — often after applicants had waited more than a year for the Tribunal to move their case forward.²

The academic diagnosis runs parallel. Noel Semple of the University of Windsor, writing in 2024, treats the inaccessibility of Ontario's adjudicative tribunals as a systemic condition with identifiable symptoms rather than a series of unrelated administrative failures.³

Naming, and the line we draw

Three of the adjudicators who decided matters in our Thunder Bay corpus appear in the public appointments register by name, with their positions and term dates. That is not a leak or an inference — it is a government publication, cross-referenced against decisions published over their signatures.

We name who decided what, and we publish appointment provenance and concentration. We do not rank adjudicators, grade them, or infer anything about a person from a docket. In a system where the overwhelming majority of matters end at procedural gates, the individual is not the variable — and a scoreboard would invite readers to blame people for a structure. The structure is here.

Sources

Public Appointments Secretariat, Government of Ontario — Tribunals Ontario agency appointee listing and appointee biographies. pas.gov.on.ca/Home/Agency/445 · appointee biographies. Figures derive from the HRTO rows of the appointee table as published — 84 rows, 79 distinct people — measured row by row. Term length is expiry minus original appointment date. Appointment data current to the 2024–25 fiscal year; appointees who left before then do not appear in the register at all.
Tribunal Watch Ontario, "Help Wanted: Effective Leadership at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario" (19 January 2024). tribunalwatch.ca. Statutory criteria: Human Rights Code, RSO 1990, c H.19, s. 32(3).
Bill 179, Fewer Backlogs and Less Partisan Tribunals Act, 2024, 1st Sess, 43rd Leg, Ontario, 2024 (first reading 25 March 2024; second reading debated and lost 18 April 2024). ola.org · Hansard, 18 April 2024. Attribution of the third-of-adjudicators figure to Ted Hsu MPP as reported in local press coverage, April 2024.
Noel Semple, "The Inaccessibility of Justice in Ontario's Adjudicative Tribunals: Symptoms and Diagnosis" (2024) 2:1 Toronto Metropolitan University Law Review 84, 2024 CanLIIDocs 3195. canlii.ca/t/7nl90.

Method: HRTO rows extracted from the published appointee table and measured for term length, role type and cross-appointment. Term length is expiry minus original appointment date. Characterisations attributed to Tribunal Watch Ontario are theirs, quoted as their assessment, not adopted as ours.

What we would publish if we could

None of the following is available from any public source, and all of it is ordinary administrative data that other justice systems publish:

Adjudicator complement by year, with appointment and expiry dates, and reappointment rates.
Caseload per adjudicator, and time-to-decision distributions.
Disposition mix per adjudicator, reported in aggregate — how many matters end at gates versus hearings.
Prior professional background of appointees, in categories (applicant-side, respondent-side, government, academic, none).
Reconsideration reassignment rates.

The last of those is the one that would answer the question this page raises, and it is a single field in a case-management system. The missing layer.

The other people who decide

Police services boards decide budgets, policy and the chief's employment — and are the usual respondent when a police service is taken to the Tribunal. Their composition is a mix of council appointees, community appointees and provincial appointees, and appointment provenance is public record. We report it as public-record fact only, never as insinuation. See the 2027 budget kit for why board composition is the deepest lever a resident has.

← The province-wide figures Our method →