long before the pandemic, backlog and blitz, errors at the LTB were a regular outcome of overworked staff, landlords' paperwork 'mistakes', and poor tenants missing hearings

take, for example, this case in which the Board's calculation errors favour the landlord by $1250-$3470:

SWL-16867-18, http://canlii.ca/t/hv7q5  was heard by Member Lundy on July 3, 2018. Only the landlord showed up. Rent was $900 per month. Tenants were short in Nov 2017 - Jan 2018 by a total of $623.42 (paying avg 77% of rent). What happened next is in para 8:

based on those determinations, the tenants were given until July 16, 2018 to pay all arrears plus the landlord's filing fee if they wanted to keep their home. I calculate that number as $1890 based on the facts stated, but the Board calculated and ordered $3,140.

if the tenants didn't pay enough to stay and were evicted, they were to be given credit for their last month's rent deposit and interest. Based on the facts stated, I calculate that as leaving them with a debt of $464.80. But the Board calculated & ordered a debt of $3,936.17.

I wasn't involved in this case (the reported details are anonymized) and don't know if the tenants filed a request for review. Many tenants don't understand what is going on fast enough to get legal help. But as I mean to show here, sometimes neither does the landlord or the LTB.

Humans make mistakes. This mistake likely means a poor Ontario family lost their home two summers before last, because they could only keep their home if they paid the landlord $1250 more than what they owed. Their debt to their old landlord includes a $3471.37 calculation error.

Another thing: par for the course, but apparently the Board made these decisions without finding out: is this a family? With children? Disabilities? Job loss? When the tenant misses the hearing and the landlord isn't forthcoming, someone at the LTB hits CTRL+V and:

Going into the pandemic, our legal system allocated 10 minutes per eviction hearing, because so many tenants don't show up. Little work has been done to increase the rate of tenant participation in their own eviction hearings. Instead, the landlord lobby chants FASTER! FASTER!

In any other industry we might view a high rate of legal disputes with customers as indicative of poor quality of service within that industry. We probably wouldn't prefer a taxpayer-funded tribunal to check and correct the frequent accounting errors overcharging their customers.

but to those who think legal tech solves these problems: this error is the likely result of LTB staff plugging landlord's numbers into a spreadsheet and just accepting the result without *thinking* or caring. LMR should make the pay & stay amount higher than debt on termination.

the risk of quickly repeating is you stop feeling the importance of each iteration. One case among thousands, but somewhere out there, the law is apparently asking a household to pay a 13th, 14th, & 15th month of 2018 rent. Think of their credit rating + their rental applications