About the project
The LTB Project brings together nearly three decades of public reporting from Ontario’s rental tribunal to make institutional activity and change easier to examine over time.
Why annual reports?
Annual reports contain statistics, performance measures, descriptions of services, organizational priorities and explanations of what the institution is doing. One report gives you a snapshot. Reading them longitudinally lets you see what persists, what changes, what disappears from reporting and what becomes newly visible.
They also have limits. Annual reports show what an institution chooses or is required to make public.
They cannot tell us everything the LTB measures, knows or discusses internally.
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What did I look at?
The project began with every ORHT and LTB annual report I could find, from the inaugural 1998-99 report through to the latest 2024-25 report. Still waiting for the 2025-26.
Most came from the Tribunals Ontario archive page, older reports no longer available from Government of Ontario websites were recovered through the Internet Archive.
I also used selected Tribunals Ontario open data and other official documents where they extend the record or explain what a measure means.
The original annual report PDFs can be found in the GitHub repository.
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How did I work with the reports?
I extracted reported numbers from the annual reports and organized them so that measures could be compared across years. Where definitions, reporting periods or categories changed, I kept those differences visible rather than treating unlike measures as though they were the same. If a later official report corrected an earlier value, I used the later value and (hopefully) kept a note of the discrepancy.
In addition, I also looked at the change in language of the reports. That meant looking at how the LTB described its mandate, workload, performance, services, technology, staffing and priorities — and how those descriptions changed over time.
If something disappears from annual reporting, I treat that as a change in what the public can see, not evidence that the underlying activity stopped.
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What can this project tell us?
The project distinguishes between what the published record shows and what I think it might mean.
When the evidence raises a question without answering it, I try to leave it as a question rather than turn it into a conclusion.
Limits of the record
This can help show:
- long-term application trends
- changes in application mix
- what the LTB reports consistently and waht changes
- changes in performance measures and service delivery
- changes in how the institution describes its work and priorities
On its own, it can't tell us:
- what happened in individual cases
- what participants experienced
- why internal decisions were made
- whether outcomes differed across groups
- whether a particular decision was fair
- whether a particular reform caused a later change
Researcher
About me
Hi, I'm Jasna, a researcher with a background in education, consulting, service design and public-sector work. I started this project because I wanted to see how the LTB's activity changed over time and what it could tell us about the wider housing system in Ontario.
What began purely as a data project gradually became an examination of what an institution's public record can tell us how it understands, measures and changes itself over time.
An invitation
What do you notice?
What would you want to know next?
If you work with the LTB, study housing, support landlords or tenants, work in government - or simply notice something in the record that deserves a closer look - I’d like to hear what you see.