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Fairness - Excessive Complexity. Dosu v. Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario
In Dosu v. Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (Ont Div Ct, 2026) the Ontario Divisional Court allowed a JR, this brought against "a portion of an interim decision of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario" which found that the applicant's "complaints ... were out of time".
I found this refreshing as an acknowledgement of the practical needs of parties in this current world of micro-managed tribunal procedures. Here the court considers a JR SOR 'reasonableness' issue where the HRTO issued "a decision that lacks internal coherence" due to a "conflation of the two hearings":[50] As noted above, for a decision to be reasonable it must be internally coherent and must not contain fatal flaws in its logic. I find that the conflation of the two hearings described above is evident in the HRTO reasons and renders them internally incoherent. It clouds the reasoning process and results in a lack of intelligibility in the decisions. The reasons repeatedly indicate that the two proceedings were separate and that the adjudicator was considering only the delay issue in her reasons. Further, the HRTO decisions indicated that they did not need to address the submissions that were made at the summary hearing, because the matter was decided in the delay section of the hearing.
[51] This is perhaps most evident in paragraphs 30 and 31 of the reconsideration decision, reproduced in paragraph 30 above. There the HRTO noted that, in effect, the “reasonable prospect of success” of an allegation is a precondition to the allegation, or an incident in a series, being considered timely. But the “reasonable prospect of success” analysis, the issue in the summary hearing, was expressly not undertaken by the HRTO. The two hearings were in fact intermingled in the HRTO decisions, despite the fact that the HRTO decisions claim to have kept them separate. The result is a decision that lacks internal coherence.
[52] I am supported in this conclusion when I contrast the HRTO’s decision in this case with other HRTO decisions in combined summary/preliminary hearings. For example, in Ratos v. Safe-Guard Canada Ltd., 2020 HRTO 307, the HRTO in a combined hearing stated “[b]efore addressing the issue of delay, I must consider whether the timely allegation in the Application must be dismissed because it has no reasonable prospect of success”. The HRTO analysed whether the “anchoring incident” had a reasonable prospect of success based on the information before it at the summary hearing and found that it could not determine that there was no reasonable prospect of success. Therefore, it went on to consider the delay issue. The decision is clear and internally consistent. The factual basis for each part of the hearing is clear, in a way that is not the case in the decisions under review here. While the order of the two hearings may depend on the circumstances, the two hearings should not be conflated in the manner that took place in this case.
[53] For these reasons, I find that the HRTO decisions are unreasonable and must be set aside.
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