CBC Toronto: Tenants question if Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board timelines are improving

Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) is scheduling hearings faster this year than it did last year, according to estimates shared with CBC Toronto this week.

Currently, the LTB estimates that the average application for non-payment of rent is scheduled for a hearing in roughly three months — down from an estimated 10 months in 2023. All other application types take an estimated five to seven months.

CBC spoke to members of landlord associations and rental experts who confirmed the process appears to be moving faster for non-payment applications. But representatives from the Federation of Metro Tenants Associations and Toronto ACORN say tenants are currently experiencing wait times that far exceed those averages.

Many tenants are waiting triple the official estimates, said Geordie Dent, the federation’s executive director.

“It’s absurd and it’s terrible service, and it’s two-tiered justice that benefits landlords ahead of tenants,” he told CBC Toronto in an interview.

The LTB is aiming to bring all applications into a 90-day life cycle and several “factors may be involved in when and why some applications are heard sooner rather than later,” a spokesperson for Tribunals Ontario told CBC Toronto in an email.

The LTB’s case backlog has been growing for years, according to a Tribunal Watch Ontario report released in February. With over 53,000 cases waiting to be heard at the time — the issue that has spurred calls for change.

“We should be able to have a voice and be heard,” said Stacey Semple, leader for the downtown Toronto chapter of ACORN Canada, a national tenant advocacy group.

“They completely just push aside the tenants’ application,” she said.

“All incoming applications and existing matters are reviewed on a case-by-case basis to assess complexity and determine when the matter can be heard,” the Tribunals Ontario spokesperson said. “The LTB will continue to work on ways to ensure parties have their matters heard in a fair, timely and effective manner.”

The Landlord and Tenant Board needs to streamline how it deals with applications so that the worst kinds of cases get investigated faster, said Varun Sriskanda, a board member of the Small Ownership Landlords of Ontario.

“I’m talking about tenant applications for slumlords in Ontario. For the landlords who don’t maintain their buildings … and tenants that are left to suffer for months with hot water, no heat, no air conditioning or pest infestations,” Sriskanda said.

“Those are issues that are pressing, but the courts are being backlogged and are being suffocated by these L1 (non-payment of rent) applications that just take up all the adjudicators’ time.”

Efforts to speed up the LTB’s work

A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Attorney General said the province has made recent investments in the LTB — including spending an additional $6.5 million in 2023-24 for 40 new adjudicators and five new staff.

Currently, the LTB has 79 full-time adjudicators and 58 part-time appointed adjudicators, the spokesperson said.

Last week, the Ontario government proposed initiatives through its Cutting Red Tape, Building Ontario Act to speed up operations at the LTB, by allowing staff to overlook small mistakes in applications and giving executives the power to reassign cases to a new adjudicator if the original one fails to complete a hearing.

Further changes needed, advocates say

The LTB is in urgent need of reform, the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) said in a report this month. Without change, TRREB CEO John DiMichele says the rental market will only worsen amid the housing crisis.

“We need to restore the confidence in the rental environment because right now, it’s starting to wane,” he said.

Landlords file the vast majority of LTB applications, at about 84 per cent, according to a 2023 Ombudsman’s report. The rest are from renters.

Michael Cuadra with Toronto ACORN said the imbalance of applications filed by landlords versus renters shows that the process requires changes with tenants in mind specifically.

“We know for a fact that there’s plenty of units in disrepair and plenty of people that are getting sick in their homes,” he said. “There needs to be some way to make things simpler so that tenants can also use it.”

Dent said he and other tenants want to see changes at the LTB that restore equity.

“It’s just delays, delays, delays,” he said.

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Article by Britnei Bilhete for CBC News Toronto.