Where human rights claims go to die.

A three-judge panel found “a fundamental flaw” in an HRTO adjudicator's reasoning.

The adjudicator, facing a bias concern, responded by stripping the applicant of his chosen lawyer instead of stepping aside. The Divisional Court set her decisions aside and remitted the case to a different adjudicator, holding:

“If the concern is one going to reasonable apprehension of bias, the appropriate remedy is for the adjudicator to recuse themselves.”

“Any recusal for bias has an impact on the ability of a tribunal to assign adjudicators. That is the administrative cost of ensuring access to impartial decision making, which is a fundamental component of a fair justice system.”

A woman reported death threats. Police interrogated her. Eight years later, the tribunal still hasn't heard her case.

Dawn Peddie and her daughter reported that a man had threatened to kill them and drown the daughter. The published record describes officers interrogating the two women complainants — the daughter reduced to tears — while the man faced no consequences. A 2021 tribunal decision found the application had a reasonable prospect of success. The police interview videos, acknowledged by Crown counsel as outstanding since October 2024, have never been produced to the applicant or the tribunal.

Along the way, the same adjudicator whose reasoning the Divisional Court faulted in Whearty dismissed the application as abandoned; the dismissal was later reversed by the tribunal itself following Divisional Court guidance — after more than a year of additional delay. The tribunal's May 25, 2026 endorsement, containing dismissal threats, was emailed directly to Ms. Peddie personally — a represented, trauma-affected applicant — contrary to the tribunal's own Practice Direction on communicating with represented parties.

A published credibility finding against a brain-injured lawyer's sworn account of his own injury.

Applicant's counsel disclosed a traumatic brain injury to the tribunal eight times over eight months. The published decisions contain no inquiry into his functional limitations, and the accommodation analysis mentions none of the eight disclosures. Instead, after counsel swore an affidavit on the exact one-year anniversary of his injury and transposed the year — a corrected affidavit was filed fifty minutes later and sat before the adjudicator for twenty-seven days — the decision states:

“Although the date of injury provided by counsel must be incorrect as the Decision was issued prior to July 24, 2025, I accept that counsel may have, or have had, ‘lingering effects’ from their head injury, which affected their ability to work.”

The corrected affidavit is not mentioned. The finding — issued without notice, at the very tribunal charged with enforcing the duty to accommodate — is now permanently indexed on CanLII under counsel's name.

A female lawyer's Reply excluded before it could be answered.

Co-counsel's Reply Submissions advanced six independent legal grounds for recusal, each anchored in published decisions and timestamped documents. The tribunal excluded that Reply before reaching the merits, ruling that no right of reply existed under its Rules and that the underlying motion and the Respondent's response “adequately capture the positions of the parties” — a determination made without inviting submissions on the point. Of the narrower grounds actually before the tribunal in that underlying motion, two went unaddressed anywhere in the reasons that followed: a prior complaint concerning the same adjudicator, and an outstanding application for judicial review of her own earlier decisions in the file. On the record the tribunal did consider, its entire treatment of counsel's advocacy reads:

“It is clear that the Zahara is unhappy with my decisions, however, the Form 10 does not provide the cogent evidence required to rebut the strong presumption of judicial impartiality.”

In the same decision, the male opposing counsel's submissions are quoted, engaged with, and accepted at paragraphs 18, 22, 24 and 33 — without any characterization of his motivations. Engaging with a male lawyer's logic while recasting a female lawyer's legal argument as emotion is a pattern courts and equality bodies have long identified as a signature of gender bias in adjudication.

A disability discrimination hearing that took ten years — because the adjudicator left partway through.

Filed in 2015. An in-person hearing began in 2018 but was not completed before the adjudicator left the Tribunal in 2021. A second hearing, held by video conference, was “fraught with procedural anomalies” — the employer was permitted to file new evidence contrary to earlier rulings, while the applicant was denied the chance to cross-examine on it. The Divisional Court found her procedural right to a fair hearing had been violated and called the proceeding's decade-long length “egregious and the exclusive fault of the Tribunal.”

Missing one email was treated as abandoning an eight-year case.

An applicant with no history of non-responsiveness missed a single email. The tribunal deemed the application abandoned and dismissed it. The Divisional Court called the dismissal “obviously unfair,” holding that “failing to respond to one e-mail, in all of the circumstances of this case, cannot possibly justify an inference that the Applicant had abandoned the proceeding.”

One day late, genuine confusion, no extension.

The tribunal refused to extend a filing deadline missed by a single day amid genuine jurisdictional confusion. The Divisional Court found the refusal unreasonable: “it is not a reasonable approach to require an accounting for every minute of every day of delay.”

A councillor's racial profiling complaint, dismissed for ignoring the Supreme Court of Canada.

Matthew Green, a Black city councillor, alleged racial profiling by a police officer during a “wellness check.” A police disciplinary hearing cleared the officer; the tribunal then dismissed Green's human rights complaint on that basis. The Divisional Court — the same reviewing judge, Justice Sachs, who found the fundamental flaw in Whearty, in a different proceeding before a different HRTO adjudicator — held the Tribunal had failed to engage with binding Supreme Court authority, calling it the first case of its kind since that authority was decided. The Ontario Human Rights Commission intervened in Green's favour. Remitted to a different adjudicator.