Cynical actors are increasingly using frivolous adjournment requests as a delay tactic at the Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB). And facing zero consequences for it.

These adjournment requests are made on behalf of both landlords and tenants, typically by lawyers or paralegals, and they’re more often than not granted. Even when a written adjournment request has been denied by the LTB prior to a hearing, the requesting party shows up on the hearing day still pleading for adjournment – and gets it. 

The practice is making LTB proceedings longer, costlier, and more frustrating for good faith actors. Not to mention how each hearing re-scheduled further contributes to the LTB’s massive case backlog and persistent administrative chaos. 

Harmful legal system delays are, of course, not new or restricted to the LTB. 

The Supreme Court of Canada noted in its (now infamous) 2016 Jordan decision that a “culture of delay” had infested Canada’s legal system to an astonishing and unsustainable degree. And in Ontario, the provincial ombudsman’s 2023 report regarding LTB dysfunction likewise detailed numerous means by which the tribunal was constantly, unreasonably permitting hearing delays. 

Though the ombudsman report did not cover the issue of abusive adjournment requests, our firm regularly encounters them in our housing law practice. Though even more alarming than the adjournments granted for spurious reasons, is the regularity with which lawyers and paralegals request adjournment simply because they have, by their own admission, neither prepared for the hearing nor submitted any evidence. 

Once upon a time, one might have expected to see members of the bar blasted out of the room with legal costs awarded against their client for such inexcusable failure to abide by basic professionalism obligations. Now, the LTB appears to regard a licensee’s total failure to prepare as completely normal. It refuses to practically ever award legal costs, capped at a wildly outdated $700 per hearing. 

What about the Law Society of Ontario?

These days it’s struggling to regulate itself, let alone the province’s entire legal profession.

That’s how far the proverbial bar has fallen.  

Of course, there are times when adjournment is reasonable, namely in cases of unforeseen or exceptional circumstances. The LTB guidelines acknowledge that. But adjudicators lack any practical incentive to critically assess reasons for requested adjournments. Or to effectively balance those reasons with the undue prejudice caused to a party who’s prepared and wants the case over with – not kicked back another 3-8 months. 

Conversely, LTB adjudicators are arguably incentivized to just grant all adjournment requests due to already-overstuffed hearing blocks and fear that if they don’t, the party requesting adjournment will file for review or appeal after losing. Indeed, the party may argue they were denied procedural fairness and would have won the case if only they had been granted that adjournment. 

Accordingly, the legislature needs to step in and create hard rules to address the problem. 

For starters, the law should prohibit adjournments requested on account of failure to prepare for a hearing, or where a party’s written request to adjourn was already denied. The law should also establish automatic (rather than discretionary) financial penalties for non-emergency adjournment requests made the day of a hearing.

Furthermore, decision-makers should be required in each case to issue a written order with reasons when granting adjournments. These orders should be made public and searchable on sites like Openroom and CanLii, so a public record exists of any party systematically abusing adjournments. 

The Ford government has for years said its hard at work fixing the LTB. Yet it continually refuses to make these sort of common sense rule changes, or to replace personnel who evidently cannot repair our judicial systems, namely Attorney General Doug Downey, Minister of Housing Paul Calandra, and Tribunals Ontario Executive Chair Sean Weir. 

As a result, the LTB remains broken as ever and getting worse. 

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Disclaimer:

This is an Opinion article submitted by a member of the Openroom community. The author's opinions are not necessarily representative of Openroom. Openroom has an objective to publish the voices of the rental ecosystem to ensure there is dialogue amongst all.

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