I’ve been staring at two sets of numbers for the past week, trying to figure out when someone at Queen’s Park is going to put them together. The first: Ontario’s Land Tribunal had 1,490 active cases as of March 2024, an 8% jump from where it was in 2021. The second: the province is on pace for about 64,800 housing starts this year, which is less than half its own target. These aren’t separate problems, they’re the same problem with a planning tribunal sitting in the middle of it.
The Bottleneck Nobody Fixed
The Ontario Land Tribunal was supposed to be a faster, leaner version of the old LPAT, which was itself a rebrand of the OMB. New name, same job: hear planning appeals, issue decisions, keep development moving. From what I can tell it hasn’t worked out that way.
Context: The Ontario Land Tribunal (OLT) was created in 2021 by merging four tribunals including the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal (LPAT) and the former Ontario Municipal Board (OMB). It hears appeals on zoning, official plan amendments, and development charges. Its decisions are binding and can override municipal council votes.
The Auditor General’s 2024 performance audit laid it out pretty clearly. Average case resolution time went from 420 days in 2021-2022 to 553 days by 2023-2024. That’s not a small drift, that’s a 32% increase in under three years and only 35% of decisions came down within the Tribunal’s own 30-day target. I looked at those numbers twice because they seemed too bad to be right.
The Auditor General also found something harder to explain away: OLT couldn’t actually prove its adjudicators were qualified for the cases they were hearing. Not “they might lack some training.” Couldn’t demonstrate it. Full stop.
Experienced adjudicators have complained about a culture shift under former Chair Marie Hubbard which favoured getting to “yes” on development over running a fair process. Tribunal Watch Ontario documented some of this publicly. I’m not saying OLT should block housing, far from it. But when process loses legitimacy on its way to approving things you get more appeals downstream, not less. And that’s exactly what’s happened.
OLT Average Case Resolution Time
The 97% Question
Here’s where it gets politically awkward. The Hamilton Spectator found in 2022 that 97% of OLT decisions went in favour of the developer or applicant. The Auditor General’s numbers for 2023-2024 showed roughly the same picture: about 90% of 116 development appeals were allowed.
I’ll give you two ways to read that. One: municipalities make bad planning decisions and Tribunal rightly corrects them. Two: OLT is a rubber stamp for development and municipalities have stopped bothering to fight because outcome is already decided. My read? Somewhere between those, but closer to the second than most people at Queen’s Park would admit.
The Toronto modular housing case is the one I keep coming back to. The city proposed 59 supportive housing units, got appealed at OLT. Tribunal eventually dismissed the appeals. But the process took nearly two years, and costs went from $14 million to $36 million. Affordable housing which was supposed to be fast-tracked, tripling in price because a process that was supposed to speed things up couldn’t get out of its own way.
That’s a 157% cost increase. For units the Tribunal approved.
Bill 185 in 2024 tried to address part of this by killing third-party appeals entirely. Which sure, removes one source of delays. But it also means community groups and environmental organizations have lost their standing at the table entirely. Whether that’s a good trade depends on how much you trust developers and municipal councils to get it right without outside checks (good luck with that).
Ontario’s Housing Math
The Ford government promised 1.5 million new homes by 2031. That required about 150,000 starts per year in 2025, ramping to 175,000 in 2026.
TD Economics is forecasting 64,800 starts for Ontario this year.
Let that number sit for a second. 64,800 against 175,000.
Ontario Housing Starts vs Target
RBC put it bluntly: “Canada isn’t in a housing starts slump. Ontario is.” National starts were up 5.6% in 2025. Ontario dragged the average down. Toronto saw a 31% year-over-year decline in starts through 2025, and family housing (single-detached, semis, townhomes) hit a record low in January 2026. Just 1,020 units across the entire province.
Look, can I pin all of that on OLT? No. Interest rates, construction costs, condo presale collapses, they’re all part of it. But here’s the piece that doesn’t get talked about enough: every project that goes to Tribunal is a project that sits for 553 days on average before anyone can break ground. During those 553 days costs go up, financing conditions change, and some projects just quietly die. The OLT isn’t the only reason Ontario’s housing supply is collapsing but it is a reason, and it’s one the province has direct control over.
Context: York, Peel, and Halton regions lost their planning responsibilities under the Planning Act as of July 1, 2024. Their official plans were transferred to lower-tier municipalities, which now handle planning appeals directly. This added planning capacity demands to smaller municipal staffs already stretched thin.
What’s Changed (and What Hasn’t)
I’ll give the province some credit here. They’ve tried a few things. Bill 185 cut third-party appeals. The OLT launched consultations in late 2025 on new Rules of Practice which push harder on mediation to resolve disputes before they hit a full hearing. There’s a new AI Practice Direction effective March 2026 requiring parties to disclose when generative AI is used in their submissions. Fine, makes sense.
But none of that touches the core problem. OLT still doesn’t have enough adjudicators to clear the backlog. The ones it has, per the Auditor General, can’t prove they’re qualified. And average case time is still a year and a half.
The province set a housing target that requires building at a pace Ontario hasn’t seen in decades, and the planning system which is supposed to process those approvals is running at about one-third efficiency by its own standards. Something has to give. It is just not clear anyone at Queen’s Park has decided what.
553 days per case. 64,800 starts against a 175,000 target. A tribunal that sides with developers 97% of the time but still can’t move fast enough to get anything built. That’s not a backlog. That’s a policy choice nobody will own.
Sources and verification: OLT case numbers (1,490 active cases, 553-day average, 35% on-time decisions) are from the Ontario Auditor General’s December 2024 performance audit. The 97% developer-favourable rate is from a Hamilton Spectator analysis of 2022 decisions; the 90% figure for 2023-2024 is from the Auditor General’s report. Housing start forecasts (64,800 for 2026) are from TD Economics via Global News. The 31% Toronto decline and family housing record low are from CMHC data reported by Global News and RBC Economics. Toronto modular housing costs ($14M to $36M) are from OLT appeal reporting. Bill 185 provisions confirmed via Osler legal analysis. Figures should be checked against the latest CMHC monthly data and the OLT’s 2024-25 annual report.
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