Original Report Summary
This author’s report on a study of the Public Appointments Secretariat’s data concerning individuals serving as adjudicators in Ontario’s administrative justice system tribunals – as that data stood on November 23, 2019 – was posted on November 27, 2019. It concluded that, for the government to bring the adjudicative tribunal resources back to the pre-Ford era’s standard, it would have to make 500 appointments or reappointments by the end of March.
That post referenced three categories of needed appointments or reappointments – viz, those needed to fill the positions where terms of one-year-or-less were scheduled to expire by the end of December (22% of the total number of positions); those needed to fill the positions where ‘ terms of more-than-one-year were scheduled to expire at or before the end of March (18% of the total ); and those needed to fill the positions that the data now showed to be vacant (which on the report’s count were 125 vacancies, amounting to 11% of the total).
Postscript: The “vacancy” count may not be reliable
In calculating the number of “vacancies”, the Report’s author counted the positions in the data for which a position description was shown but the place for the appointee’s name was left blank. He assumed that those positions would identify the shortfall in the number of adjudicators at work on November 23rd as compared to the pre-Ford roster.
Readers have now advised that that assumption may not be warranted; that some pre-Ford positions made vacant by the refusal of recommended reappointments may have been removed from the data altogether.
If that were so, to the report’s count of 125 “vacancies” one would have to add an unknown number of what one might call “abandoned” positions, bringing the total number of adjudicator positions required to be filled by the end of March (if the pre-Ford level of administrative justice resources were to be maintained) to 500 plus that unknown number.
RE