Final decisions only. Interim and procedural rulings are excluded. This is not a count of people: a matter that settles or is withdrawn produces no published decision, so more individuals sought the Tribunal's help than appear here. That gap.
Unit: final decisions, all respondents, province-wide, first nine months of 2025 — the reporting window in the Tribunal's own published figures, not a sample we chose. Nothing here is annualised. Source and detail.
Where do you even complain?
Most people complain before they think about suing — and complaint bodies cannot award money. Eleven routes exist. They differ less in subject matter than in what each one can order at the end.
| Route | Money for the harm | Lost wages |
Punitive damages | Policy or training |
Discipline of a person | Free | Costs risk to you |
|---|
Three questions, about a minute, nothing saved. It also tells you what no route on your shortlist can give you.
What we found
Representation predicts how your case ends
Across three unrelated institutions, matters die at paper gates in inverse proportion to who has a lawyer. 2% abandonment where counsel appears in 70% of matters; 29% where it appears in 45%.
FINDING 02The rules that end cases are cited 5× more than the law of discrimination
In 484 decisions, the one-year deadline appears in 54%. The test for discrimination appears in 7%. Intersectionality: zero.
FINDING 03At one police service, most complaints came from inside it
62% of applications were filed by the service's own members and the chair of its oversight board. Zero reached a hearing in seventeen years.
FINDING 04Ontario's racial profiling law is built by accused people
Profiling reaches the Court of Appeal through criminal appeals, not complaints. Two Ontario police human rights cases have got there in fourteen years.
The cases behind the numbers
Three matters from the record we read in full. Each is a person, and each opens onto the part of the system it exposes.
A Black six-year-old, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles, held face-down on a school bench
Two officers, each roughly six feet tall and 190–200 pounds. The Tribunal found race was a factor, called the force racially discriminatory and a very serious breach, and ordered $35,000 — a year after the finding. She became fearful of police, was teased, and withdrew from friends.
What awards are actually worth →Appointed to oversee a police service after findings of systemic racism — then investigated by it
After findings that the service had failed Indigenous families — including inadequate death investigations — the oversight board was dissolved and reconstituted. Georjann Morriseau, former Fort William First Nation chief, was named chair in 2019 to implement the Sinclair recommendations. Within months the service she oversaw was investigating her. The former chief and the service’s lawyer were later charged after an OPP investigation.
Fifty-seven decisions, zero remedies →He won — then the adjudicator cancelled her own decision
Briggs was racially profiled in 2011. The Vice-Chair reserved eighteen months, ruled for him, then four years later cancelled that ruling as an abuse of process. Two courts undid it.
Where do you complain, and when is it worth suing →The Visibility Gap
When a person enters a legal system, what outcomes become visible — and what outcomes disappear? Published decisions show the cases that reach a formal conclusion. They reveal far less about the cases that exit earlier: settlement, withdrawal, procedural dismissal, or outcomes that never generate published reasons. An exit is not a verdict.
Solid = counted. Hatched = happened, and left no record anyone publishes.
Explore
Case Studies
One institution at a time, every decision read in full.
02Institutions
Living ledgers of public bodies: records, oversight, courts, money.
03The Journey
Stage-by-stage guides to surviving the Tribunal's gates.
04The Record
Open datasets, what no public source holds, and what no source can see.
05Communities
Four faces, one institution — the record read from the communities' side.
06What changed / where it went
Eighteen years of narrowed access, beside the spending record. Two phones.
07Method
How we count, what we refuse to claim, and how we correct.
Everything on this site
Start here
Guides
The stages
Research
- Complain or sue: full comparison
- Racial profiling: how it's proven
- AI legal research tools
- Who decides your case
- Which cases actually get cited
- Province-wide HRTO figures
- Federal vs Ontario compared
- The section 35 gap
- Naming an individual officer
- Are tribunal records public?
- What changed since 2008
- Data that isn't public
- All datasets