Toronto, Ontario

Ontario Human Rights Adjudicator Wrongly Dismissed Woman's Police Misconduct Claim, Failed to Accommodate Disabled Counsel, Contacted Trauma Survivor Directly Without Lawyer, and Excluded Female Counsel's Reply Submissions Before Ruling on Recusal

Divisional Court has already found a fundamental reasoning flaw in the same adjudicator's decisions.

Published credibility finding against disabled lawyer's own account of his injury now permanent on CanLII.

Dawn Peddie's application — about OPP officers who interrogated women complainants while their abuser faced no consequences — delayed eight years and counting.

A Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario adjudicator wrongly dismissed a woman's sex discrimination complaint against the Ontario Provincial Police, made repeated threats of dismissal against a disabled lawyer while he was under physician's orders not to file, contacted the trauma survivor applicant directly without her lawyer to deliver dismissal threats, published a permanent credibility finding against the disabled lawyer's sworn account of his own injury without notice or opportunity to respond, and excluded female co-counsel's Reply Submissions — which advanced six independent legal grounds for the adjudicator's own recusal — from the record before ruling on the recusal request, without inviting submissions on whether that exclusion was appropriate.

The adjudicator is Member Lavinia Inbar of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. The applicant is Dawn Peddie. The proceeding is HRTO File No. 2018-34879-I, filed in 2018. Eight years later, Ms. Peddie's application has still not reached a merits hearing.

What Dawn Peddie's Application Is About

Dawn Peddie and her daughter Tieler reported to Ontario Provincial Police that a man had threatened to kill them and drown Tieler. He had chased Dawn down a laneway threatening to beat her and kill her. He screamed “let me at her.” The OPP’s response was to interrogate Dawn and Tieler as if they were the suspects. Tieler was reduced to tears during police questioning. A police officer concluded that Dawn was “trying to get the house because she’s a woman.” The man who made the death threats faced no consequences. Dawn Peddie filed a human rights application in 2018 alleging sex discrimination in services by the OPP. A 2021 Summary Hearing found the application had reasonable prospect of success and directed it to continue. The police interview videos — which document the interrogation of two women complainants — have been acknowledged by Respondent’s counsel as outstanding since October 2024. They have never been produced to the Applicant or the Tribunal.

What Member Inbar Did

Member Inbar wrongly dismissed Dawn Peddie’s application as abandoned in June 2025. Counsel, Glyn Hotz of Zahara·Hotz Law, had sustained a traumatic brain injury on July 24, 2024, and sent the HRTO eight documented disability disclosures over eight months. Member Inbar never asked a single question about his functional limitations. The dismissal was later reversed through a Tribunal-initiated reconsideration prompted by Divisional Court guidance in an unrelated case, at a cost of over a year of additional delay.

Decision 2025 HRTO 2078 contains this finding at paragraph 38:

“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.”

Counsel had sworn an affidavit on July 24, 2025 — the exact one-year anniversary of his injury — and transposed the year. A corrected affidavit was filed fifty minutes later. It was before Member Inbar for twenty-seven days. She did not mention it. That finding is permanently indexed on CanLII under his name.

What Happened to Co-Counsel's Recusal Submissions

On June 29, 2026, HRTO Member Lavinia Inbar issued Interim Decision 2026 HRTO 1011, ruling on a recusal request the Applicant filed June 3, 2026. Co-counsel Jodi Zahara’s Reply Submissions of June 15, 2026 subsequently advanced six independent grounds for recusal — including a published credibility finding against primary counsel’s sworn evidence, an outstanding Divisional Court judicial review, asymmetric compliance treatment between the parties, and irreconcilable characterizations of the same disclosure across two of the Member’s own decisions.

The Tribunal excluded that Reply from consideration before reaching the merits. It ruled that no right of reply existed under its Rules of Procedure, and that the original June 3 request and the Respondent’s response “adequately capture the positions of the parties” — a determination made without inviting submissions from either party on whether that discretion should be exercised. Of the narrower grounds that were before the Tribunal in the original June 3 request, two went unaddressed anywhere in the decision that followed: a prior complaint concerning the same adjudicator, described in that request as having been redirected away from the record of proceeding; and the outstanding judicial review of the Member’s own earlier decisions in this file, which has not been withdrawn.

On the record the Tribunal did consider, its engagement with counsel’s advocacy is captured in a single sentence:

“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.”

Throughout the same decision, the submissions of Respondent’s counsel Adrien Iafrate are quoted at paragraphs 18, 22, 24, and 33, engaged with substantively, and accepted — including his multimedia disclosure position, accepted as complete despite the files never having been received by the Tribunal itself. There is no characterization of his motivations.

The Divisional Court Has Already Found a Fundamental Reasoning Flaw

In Whearty v. Ontario (Human Rights Tribunal), 2025 ONSC 932, a three-judge panel of the Divisional Court set aside two decisions by Member Inbar — an Interim Decision and a Reconsideration Decision, both in a case where she had declined to recuse herself — finding “a fundamental flaw in her reasoning process” and holding that where a bias concern exists, the appropriate remedy is for the adjudicator to recuse herself, not to take steps that deprive parties of their rights. The matter was remitted to a different adjudicator. This is not the first recusal request naming Member Inbar to have been decided by Member Inbar herself.

A Public Record

Zahara·Hotz Law has published a public record documenting this pattern, drawn from the Tribunal’s own published decisions, official statistics, and Divisional Court rulings — including this file and comparable cases from other adjudicators across the same institution. It is available at hrtodiscrimination.ca and includes source citations for every figure and quotation.

Letters Sent

Zahara·Hotz Law has sent letters to the HRTO Registrar and Executive Chair, the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, setting out the systemic concerns raised by this record.

A conduct documentation of specific findings, grounded in exact language from published decisions with source citations, has been prepared and attached to those letters.

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