Ontario Land Tribunal E-file Portal: A Simplified Appeals Submission Process

Backgrounder

The Ontario Land Tribunal (OLT) e-file portal enables the preparation and submission of appeals online. The platform became available on March 27, 2024, and the Tribunal is currently registering municipalities and other approval authorities to accept appeals through the portal.

The list of municipalities and other approval authorities that are accepting appeals through e-file is available on the e-file landing page.

With the e-file portal:

Appellants can submit and manage their appeals online, including all supporting documentation and fee payment.

Municipalities and other approval authorities can receive, manage and forward appeals to the Tribunal.

The portal replicates the previously legislated manual appeal filing process, while incorporating automation and functional improvements offered by digitization, including:

Smart Form technology: applies logic based on different appeal types to keep the digital versions of the A1 and M1 appeal forms simple and focused to each user’s needs.

CCPay Online Payment Service: facilitates real-time, secure payments via credit cards and debit-credit cards.

User-friendly dashboard: allows appellants and approval authorities to easily understand what information is required to submit their appeals.

Improving Accuracy and Reducing Errors

Smart Form technology used with e-filing improves accuracy and reduces errors by:

Enforcing mandatory fields and using logic that will assist the user in providing accurate information.

Pre-populating data, where applicable, enabling users (appellants and approval authorities) to submit accurate information and minimizing the time to complete and submit the forms.

Ensuring users are always using the correct and most up-to-date form and therefore less likely to omit information that the Tribunal needs to process the appeal submission.

Saving Time and Simplifying Processes

Electronic payment saves approval authorities time dealing with cheques.

Receiving appeals digitally eliminates the need to scan paper documents into digital format or send through surface mail/courier.

Built-in intelligence speeds up the grouping of appeals into cases.

With improved accuracy and completeness of appeal packages, the Tribunal will spend less time gathering missing information.

Consultation Process

The e-file portal was developed in consultation with legal representatives, municipal and ministry partners representing the most frequent users of the Ontario Land Tribunal. Focus groups were held in March 2023 and February 2024 with 28 participants across 5 municipalities of Ontario, spanning 7 legal firms and 3 ministries. They were invited to provide feedback and suggest features they’d like to see that would address any pain points in the current manual process.

Further consultation on changes to the Tribunal’s Rules of Practice and Procedure to introduce a mandatory requirement for municipalities to forward appeals through the e-file portal is taking place until September 27, 2024.