Good government cannot, alas, make either landlords or tenants into angels. And that’s not really what we ask government to do: rather, with an apparatus of legislation, regulation, and a small amount of direct provision (Ontario’s woefully small and underfunded social-housing sector), we structure the rental market to try to keep the possibility of abuses to a reasonable minimum. At least, that’s what you might may we do in this province. But a new report from the Ontario Ombudsman shows that at least one pillar of the province’s rental regulation went off the rails shortly after Doug Ford and the PC Party won power, and it still hasn’t fully recovered.
The story, laid out in extensive, excoriating detail by Ombudsman Paul Dubé, starts with the 2018 election. For the first time in 15 years, power changed hands in Ontario, and it took some time for the new government to spin up its processes for filling the scores of public appointments that make up the constellation of agencies, boards, and commissions across government — including, fatefully, the Landlord and Tenant Board. The LTB hears complaints from landlords and tenants seeking redress from the government — mostly landlords seeking to evict problem tenants, but also tenants seeking to compel their landlords to make needed repairs or cease abusive conduct.
The problem is that the LTB can hear only as many cases as its members can fit in a day, so if the government drops the ball on filling vacancies at the tribunal — as it did in late 2018 — the backlog in cases can start to grow. As the government started filling vacancies, COVID-19 struck, and both the pandemic and court-ordered moratoriums on evictions threw the LTB’s work into chaos. Then there were the more mundane government-agency problems — recurring technical snafus with the LTB’s software, some LTB members dragging their heels in issuing orders for weeks or even months — that wouldn’t have been critical if not for everything that had already failed.
Not everything is the government’s fault. But keeping tribunals running smoothly very much is its responsibility. And, for several years, the Ford government was failing at it — with profound human consequences for tenants and landlords alike: Tenants couldn’t get orders forcing landlords to make necessary repairs. Small landlords ended up living in their cars as rent went unpaid and bills piled up. Even social-housing agencies weren’t spared the chaos of the LTB’s dysfunction.
No wonder, then, that Dubé formally found in his report that the LTB’s work was “unreasonable.”
"Over the past few years, the Board has proven itself unequipped for the task of reducing its extraordinary backlog of applications. More importantly, those applications represent tens of thousands of Ontarians suffering hardship caused by the Board’s inability to provide timely service,” Dubé writes. “As an administrative tribunal, the Board is fundamentally failing in its role of providing swift justice to those seeking resolution of residential landlord and tenant issues. In doing so, it is denying justice to a significant segment of Ontarians."
Agenda segment, May 2, 2023: Is the Landlord and Tenant Board broken?
Dubé’s report doesn’t just outline a litany of failures but also suggests a number of solutions to the woes at the LTB. Some of them are shockingly basic, like having the government actually set a standard complement of board members and staff and actively work to maintain it or having a computer system that can accurately reflect the status of cases before the board. Groundbreaking stuff all around, you see.
The woes of people caught in the interlocking failures of the Landlord and Tenant Board are bad enough on their own to deserve an effective response from the government, and I hope they get it. But, as I pored over the pages of Dubé’s report, I couldn’t shake the thought that, fundamentally, this isn’t supposed to be a hard job: this wasn’t the result of a massive change in government policy that institutions struggled to keep up with. Ontario has had some version of the LTB for decades, and administering this stuff is supposed to be the banal everyday work of government. It should be the kind of thing we can take for granted.
The future is going to be no less complicated or difficult than the present, and we’ll have a lot to ask of the government in years to come, whether in terms of building clean energy or accommodating massive demographic changes. It would be nice to be confident that government is up to the challenge. But the ombudsman’s latest report is a sobering example of how easy it is for government to fail — and of how severe and enduring the consequences can be when it does.
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