The Landlord and Tenant Board is broken. Tenants and landlords languish for months, sometimes years, waiting for their hearing to be scheduled. Hearings are also not scheduled equitably, with tenants facing wait times twice as long as landlords when they file their own applications.
Since 2020, despite removing all in-person services, tripling the number of adjudicators, and increasing the budget for Tribunals Ontario (which oversees the Board), the backlog of cases and wait times are worse than ever. Tribunals Ontario estimates the backlog to be 40,000 cases at present with parties still waiting many months for a hearing. We can all agree this is a flawed system.
However, we are alarmed by the calls of some landlords and lobbyists that the solution to the delays should be automatic evictions for non-payment of rent.
Automatic evictions are proven to be harmful and discriminatory
This is not a new idea. Ontario had a similar system in place for almost a decade until the Residential Tenancies Act (RTA) was introduced in 2006.
The old process was rightly criticized. Twenty years ago, the Ontario Ombudsman, Clare Lewis, looked into automatic evictions for late or non-payment of rent and found that “such evictions may have disproportionate and oppressive consequences for vulnerable tenants.” He concluded that it may discriminate against vulnerable Ontarians.
The Board’s own adjudicator at the time also found this practice to be “discriminatory.” The City of Toronto further determined that in 10% of all rent arrears evictions, the tenant owed no money or was even owed money from their landlord at the time of eviction. This happened because no hearing took place, and landlords were not required to inform the Board of rent payments made after submitting the eviction application.
The City of Toronto also found that low-income families were disproportionately hurt by the eviction process:
- Almost half (48%) of tenants facing eviction were families with children.
- 39% of tenants facing eviction faced a short term financial crisis – such as loss of job, temporary lay-off, reduced hours, irregular pay, or change of employment.
- Almost one-fifth of tenants facing eviction reported that medical problems or expenses had resulted in arrears.
- The financial impact of eviction – including moving costs, first and last month’s rent, storage of possession, hydro deposits – placed an additional financial burden on households already in difficult financial circumstances.
- Tenants reported increased family emotional stress, including negative impacts on children who had to leave their schools and often had to live separately from one or more parent while the family found new housing.
We already know automatic evictions are harmful. That’s why the province stopped doing them.
Non-payment of rent is not always as simple as it seems
Yes, the majority of applications filed with the Board are for evictions due to unpaid rent, commonly referred to as “arrears.” That’s always been the case. However, it is dangerous to frame arrears applications as simple or straightforward.
This is because some landlords lie. They will lie to their tenants and they will lie to the Board. The media reports extensively on the growing prevalence of fraudulent “own-use” evictions and renovictions. Other landlords bring false arrears applications against their tenant in the hopes that they will not test their evidence in a hearing. Some demand their tenants pay illegal increases, and if the tenant refuses, they bring an eviction application against them for not paying an increase that wasn’t even legal to begin with. The reason certain landlords resort to fraud and misinformation is simple: they can make more money re-renting a vacant unit.
Automating evictions strips away all of the context, all of the fairness, and all of the justice. They were harmful back then and would be harmful now, especially given that we are in the midst of an affordable housing crisis.
What would fix the backlog at the Board instead?
Legal clinics, like ACTO, serve almost 100,000 tenants every year. We see the fault lines and we know what the solutions are. To address the inefficiencies and dysfunction at the Board, we propose two measures.
First, the Board should return to a regional scheduling model. When the Board moved operations online, they switched from scheduling cases regionally to scheduling them provincially. This has created unmanageable super blocks of hearings that adjudicators struggle to get through in a timely manner.
According to our analysis, regional scheduling would reduce the number of hearing blocks per day from the 2021-22 average of 47.5 down to 15. It would reduce the number of days from filing to first hearing from the average 87.5 days down to 30. It would save $3.1 million of taxpayer money by bringing the number of adjudicators required down from the current roster of 137 to 30.
Second, the Board should end digital hearings as their default. Both landlords and tenants agree that it doesn’t work and leads to delays. Courts, tribunals, and legislatures know that in-person meetings help resolve matters faster and fairer.
Let’s not be so quick to suggest extreme measures as a solution, especially those that failed before. The province has far better options to fix their broken tribunal, ones that don’t put basic rights on the chopping block.