Ontario’s tenancy arbitration system is broken, but not for the reasons the Ford government would like you to believe. In November of 2025, Ontario passed Bill 60, which brings in sweeping changes to Ontario’s Residential Tenancies Act under the guise of “speeding up” the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) processes. Yet these changes will do little to address the real causes of the system’s collapse and will instead make life far more precarious for tenants.
The story the government tells is simple: hearings take too long, backlogs are growing, and the process needs to move faster. What they fail to mention is that the Ford government helped create this crisis in the first place.
A Manufactured Backlog
For nearly a decade, eviction timelines in the Greater Toronto Area were remarkably stable. Between 2010 and 2018, the average time between an eviction filing and a final outcome hovered around 50 days. However, starting in 2019—well before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic—this system began to unravel. By the end of 2019, wait times had exploded to over 250 days, and by April of 2022, nearly 13,000 cases filed since the start of the pandemic had yet to receive a disposition.
Figure 1: Average Time Between Filing Date and Disposition Date by Date of Filing in the GTHA, 2010-21 and Number of Cases that had not reached a disposition by April 2022 by Filing Date. Source: LTB Data Custom Tabulated by Sean Grisdale. Figures do not include filings that had not reached disposition by April of 2022. Note that the shape of this chart is influenced by the fact that 14,235 filings had not yet received a disposition by end of April 2022. 90% of these excluded filings were filed since the pandemic, and as of April 30, 2022, the average un-decided Covid-19 filing had been filed 316 days prior. However, including them makes the graph hard to interpret as this would also include filings that had been dated only days or months before the end of 2021 and would not normally have received a hearing at that point anyway.
Why did the timeframe between filing and disposition suddenly skyrocket? Because the government quietly starved the LTB of adjudicators. With more than 82,000 applications being filed in Ontario between 2018–2019, the Board needed approximately 300 decisions a day to stay afloat. Instead, by late 2019 it had just 33 full-time and 7 part-time adjudicators. The Ombudsman and Tribunals Ontario both pointed to this hiring shortage as the core driver of delays.
Then came COVID-19. The eviction moratorium temporarily shut down the Board, creating an unavoidable backlog. When operations resumed, the government’s “digital-first” model created widespread technical chaos, further slowing proceedings. Meanwhile, financialized landlords, whose business models depend on rapid turnover and rising rents, continued to disproportionately contribute to the backlog.
In short: a starving tribunal, a global pandemic, poorly coordinated online transition, and an increased volume of filings from profit-driven landlords manufactured today’s crisis, not tenants.
Bill 60: Fixing the Problem by Punishing the Vulnerable
Instead of addressing the root issues of consistent underfunding, poorly managed modernization, and a changing investor-driven rental market, the Ontario government has passed reforms that undermine security of tenure and weaken access to justice.
At the centerpiece of Bill 60 is the proposal to block tenants from raising new issues at rent arrears hearings unless they have paid 50 per cent of the arrears upfront. The government frames this as protection against tenants who “withhold rent in bad faith.” But this is a solution in search of a problem. Cases citing the relevant provision—Section 82(1)(b)—are rare, and tenants often lack legal representation. Most tenants simply do not know how or when to formally raise issues such as chronic plumbing failures, heating outages, or mould.
Under current law, adjudicators have the discretion to consider evidence brought forward on the day of a hearing, if the tenant provides a valid explanation. This protects tenants who are unfamiliar with legal procedures while ensuring that adjudicators, not politicians, decide whether evidence is relevant. Stripping this discretion and linking the right to be heard to the ability to pay will deny vulnerable tenants a fair hearing.
Not allowing tenants to raise issues at arrears hearings may also add to the backlog of tenant applications – which leaves tenants waiting months for a hearing or abandoning their application altogether. As paragraph 148 of the Ombudsman report outlines, landlord applications are often prioritized over tenant applications. According to Tribunals Ontario 2024-25 Annual Report tenants had to wait an average of 197 days for their application for maintenance to be heard, leaving tenants waiting almost 4 times as long as landlord who filed an application to terminate and evict a tenant (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Ontario Landlord Tenant Board Average Days to First Hearing (October 1, 2025-December 31, 2025)
Similarly, reducing the window to request a review of an LTB decision to just 15 days, down from the current 30, will significantly harm both tenants and small landlords. These compressed timelines risk shutting out low-income households and landlords unfamiliar with the legal process who need time to seek legal advice.
Evictions Without a Safety Net
One of the most troubling aspects of Bill 60 is the increased emphasis on eviction enforcement. The government plans to hire additional staff to accelerate evictions, in some regions already carried out within two to three weeks. As of 2024, Ontario has failed to meet its commitment to increase the supply of social and affordable housing by 15 per cent. We are accelerating evictions into homelessness without expanding the support systems necessary to prevent it.
Other jurisdictions, such as Wales, view eviction as a moment for intervention—not removal. Under the Housing (Wales) Act of 2014, governments have a statutory obligation to take reasonable steps to prevent homelessness. Ontario is moving in the opposite direction.
Transparency for Whom?
The government will also expand public access to LTB decisions, framing it as increasing transparency. But platforms already exist to share these decisions—and in practice, they often serve as screening tools for landlords, enabling tenant blacklisting. Meanwhile, the broader context driving arrears like rent inflation, stagnant incomes, and record profits for financialized landlords rarely appear in such datasets.
A System Built on Blame Instead of Solutions
The Ford government has constructed a narrative in which tenants acting in bad-faith are to blame for LTB delays. The actual causes—government cuts, tribunal mismanagement, a flawed digital transition, and a back-log in eviction filings—are left unmentioned.
Bill 60 does not address the backlog. It does not improve access to justice. It does not meaningfully shorten hearing times or increase adjudicator capacity.
Instead, it restricts tenant rights, accelerates evictions, and shifts responsibility for a government-created crisis onto people already living in an increasingly unaffordable rental market.
Ontario needs a balanced, evidence-based approach that protects tenancies, strengthens access to justice, and ensures adjudicators, not cabinet ministers, maintain discretion over hearings. That includes:
- hiring enough adjudicators to meet caseloads,
- improving digital systems before relying on them,
- reviewing case law before removing critical tenant protections, and investing in housing stability, not just eviction enforcement.
The good news is that Ontario’s Residential Tenancy Act is relatively robust compared to other provinces across Canada. At the Balanced Supply of Housing, we’ve been mapping jurisdictional differences across the country, and Ontario comes out on-top in a number of areas. Nonetheless, Bill 60 erodes these rights by placing the blame for delays on tenants, despite the overwhelming evidence that backlogs are due to a starved LTB. Bill 60 is not a solution to the housing crisis it is a transfer of costs and consequences onto the tenants least able to bear them.
We encourage organizations in the housing sector to review the bill’s full details on the Legislative Assembly of Ontario website and follow provincial news implementation details emerge.
The Balanced Supply of Housing (BSH) is a SSHRC-CMHC funded partnership grant led by Dr. Alexandra Flynn at UBC’s Peter A. Allard School of Law, focused on land use and housing financialization across Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.
