Publications

The purpose of this site is to provide a listing of the cases that provide the data in support of various journal articles. All cases were downloaded from the CanLII website under the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (“ONHRT”) at https://www.canlii.org/on/onhrt. The articles are published in peer-reviewed journals and are critiques of the direct access model which was introduced on June 30, 2008 as the foundation of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.

Methodologies

For the article, “Does the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal have a Reasonable Prospect of Success?” the following methodology was used to codify HRTO files reviewed between April 1, 2017 and March 31, 2020. 

The HRTO deals with cases at a summary stage (includes preliminary stage and summary motions) or merit hearing stage. For this analysis, 2,261 cases at summary stage, posted on CanLII under the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario for the fiscal years 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20 collectively were selected for review. 

Each case was first identified as being dealt with at a preliminary stage or at a summary motion. Preliminary stage includes cases which were administratively dismissed following a Notice of Intent to Dismiss (NOID), a Failure to Comply with a Case Assessment Directive (CAD) or a direct request for information from a vice chair, or a Failure to attend a scheduled Mediation. 

Cases for which a summary hearing was scheduled, and the vice-chair attended, were identified as Summary Motions and recorded as Dismissed, Upheld (the case would advance to a merit hearing), Partially Upheld (part of the case was dismissed while part was upheld for further review) or Withdrawn by the applicant. 

The grounds for dismissals and partially dismissed cases at summary motion were identified as No Reasonable Prospect of Success, Timeliness, Jurisdiction and/or Abuse of Process. Cases where the applicant failed to attend a scheduled summary motion hearing were categorized as Abandoned. 

The following were excluded from this analysis: merit hearings, cases which were deferred, purely procedural matters, dealt with a Contravention of Settlement, involved a Request to Reactive or reprisal.

For “The Guardians of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario” selected cases for the years 2016-2017, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 were reviewed. Cases were codified based on the written reports in the CanLII database. All cases were selected from the CanLII database in two rounds of searches, by two people, using the terms “balance of probabilities” and “testify, evidence”. 

Selected cases were “Final Decisions” and excluded Notices of Intent to Dismiss (NOIDs), Interim Decisions, Reactivations, Minutes of Settlement (MOS), Reconsiderations, Interim Remedies, Remedy Decisions, Contravention of Settlements, and Procedural i.e. Requests for Production. Summary and Preliminary Hearings were only included if the adjudicator noted that evidence was submitted and/or the applicant or respondent testified. 

Using the above criteria, and cross checking to ensure no duplication between the searches, 90 files were pulled for review in 2016-2017, 107 in 2017-2018 and 72 in 2018-2019 respectively. 

Each file was codified to indicate representation of the Applicant, Respondent and Intervenor as either self-represented (SR), representative (R), counselor (C), paralegal (P), student at law (SAL) or N/A if not attending or not indicated. In the analysis, SR and R were considered as not having legal counsel whereas C, P and SAL were all considered as providing legal counsel. Dispositions were coded as upheld (U), partial upheld (PU) or dismissed (D). 

The various files were downloaded from CanLII online: <canlii.org/en/on/onhrt/> (date accessed: 28 February 2023 to 9 November 2023).