Tenants, landlords agree Ontario's rental tribunal is a mess. A new investigation looks at how to fix it
CBC
Ontario's trouble-plagued Landlord and Tenant Board goes under the microscope on Thursday when the province's ombudsman releases the report on his investigation into delays at the rental-housing tribunal.
The Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) rules on rental disputes in Ontario, handling tens of thousands of cases every year. It's the tribunal where tenants can fight unjustified rent increases and where landlords go to seek eviction orders.
More than 30 per cent of Ontario households — or roughly five million people — live in rental accommodation, according to Statistics Canada.
Although tenants and landlords are adversaries when they have a case at the LTB, the two sides agree on one thing: the rental tribunal has been functioning poorly for years.
Waiting a year for a hearing is now common, said Tony Irwin, president and CEO of the Federation of Rental-Housing Providers of Ontario, the province's biggest landlord association.
"I think most reasonable people would agree that's far too long to be able to get something adjudicated," said Irwin.
Geordie Dent, executive director of the Federation of Metro Tenants' Associations, describes the LTB as broken.
"It's never functioned well for us," said Dent in an interview. "The delays that landlords are dealing with today, tenants have been dealing with those delays for years."
Ontario's ombudsman Paul Dubé announced the investigation back in January 2020, citing a sharp increase in complaints to his office during 2019 about delays and backlogs at the LTB.
The ombudsman's announcement came just weeks after CBC News reported record-long waits for hearings at the rental tribunal. Observers attributed the delays to the failure of Premier Doug Ford's government to fill vacant adjudicator positions at the board. (Only cabinet has the authority to appoint adjudicators.) .
The backlogs worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2022, the LTB's average wait to get a date for a hearing ballooned to eight months and some landlords reported they waited in total a year and a half before an eviction hearing actually took place.
The LTB received more than 80,000 applications in 2019-20, the last fiscal year before the pandemic. About 90 per cent of cases are brought by landlords, and the vast bulk of those are applications for eviction orders.
The delays at the LTB have especially affected small-scale landlords who have gone months without rent payments while waiting for an eviction hearing.
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