The LTB just put your name in a spreadsheet, Barrie.

If you have been to the Landlord and Tenant Board since January — as a tenant or as a landlord — there is now a file on a government website with your name in it. Anyone can download it. Nobody had to tell you.

This happened on July 24. It was announced in an operational update on the Tribunals Ontario website, the kind of notice that reaches people who read tribunal bulletins for a living and almost nobody else. Two months later, most of the landlords and tenants we talk to in Barrie have no idea it happened.

What was actually released

The LTB is now publishing its final orders through Ontario's Open Data Catalogue. The first release covered orders issued between January and June 2026. New orders follow monthly, roughly two to three months after they are issued.

The part that matters most is the part that got the least attention: orders going back to 2021 are being added in phases. This is not only about hearings from this year. If you had a hearing in 2022, your order is on its way into the same file.

The only orders left out are those an adjudicator has made subject to a confidentiality order. Those are rare by design, and we will come back to them.

It is a file, not a search box — and that is the whole story

What the government published is a catalogue you download. It is not a search page where you type a name and get an answer. On its own it is close to unusable for an ordinary person: a large CSV and a pile of PDFs.

That sounds reassuring. It is not, and here is why. The data is released under the Open Government Licence – Ontario, which permits anyone to copy, modify and republish it, including commercially. So the practical effect is not that your neighbour will download a CSV. It is that tenant-screening companies already have, and the searchable product they build from it is the thing a landlord will actually use. Some were writing about the release within days.

The information was technically public before — LTB hearings are open, and many orders have been on CanLII for years. But “technically public” and “bulk downloadable under a licence that permits commercial republication” are different worlds. That gap is the change.

Why this lands harder here than in Toronto

In a downtown tower, screening is done by a property management company that was already buying credit and background reports. Nothing much changes for them.

Around Simcoe County, the person deciding who gets the basement apartment is usually the person who lives upstairs. They screen on instinct, a credit check and a phone call to the last landlord. Handing that person a searchable list of everyone who has ever been named in an LTB order changes their decision far more than it changes a property manager's.

And it cuts both ways, which is the part landlords tend to miss. The same file contains every order where a landlord was found to have acted in bad faith, ended a tenancy under false pretences, or been ordered to pay a tenant compensation. If you are a landlord in Barrie, your record is in there too — and a prospective tenant can read it.

What an order actually proves

This is where people go wrong in both directions. An order is the end of a story, recorded in a few pages. It is not the story.

A single order from three years ago, read cold, tells you almost nothing about whether someone will be a good tenant. The person may have lost a job and caught up in full. They may have withheld rent over a heating failure the Board later agreed with them about. They may have been the respondent in an application the landlord lost. None of that is legible from the fact that an order exists with their name on it.

If you are screening tenants, the law did not change

A lot of the commentary about this release has been written by people who sell real estate or screening services, and it reads like a new tool arrived. A new tool did arrive. The rules governing how you may use it did not move an inch.

You are allowed to ask for and consider rental history, credit references, a credit check, and income information. You have always been allowed to. What you may not do is use any of it as cover for a decision the Human Rights Code prohibits.

How to find your own order

If you want to know what is out there about you, start with your file number — it is on every piece of paper the Board sent you. Then:

1. Check CanLII first. It is free, it is searchable, and it has carried LTB decisions for years. If your order is there, that is the fastest way to read it.
2. Then check the Open Data Catalogue. Be ready to download a large file rather than search a page.
3. Read the whole order, not the outcome line. If it records a payment plan you completed, or findings in your favour, those words are in there too — and they are worth quoting to a prospective landlord who raises it.
4. If what you find is wrong — a name that is not yours, an order that was later set aside — call us before you contact anyone else.

What we recommend

If you are a tenant:

1. Look yourself up now, before a landlord does it for you.
2. If an order about you exists, have a one-sentence explanation ready. “I fell behind when I lost a job in 2023, I paid it off under a plan, here is the reference from that landlord” beats silence every time.
3. If you have a hearing coming, ask us about confidentiality or anonymization before the hearing.

If you are a landlord:

1. Do not build a rule that screens out everyone who appears in the file. That is the single fastest way to turn a screening decision into a human rights application.
2. If an order matters to your decision, read it and ask the applicant about it. Their answer is evidence; the order alone is not.
3. Remember that your own record is in the same file, and check what it says.

And if you are dealing with a notice rather than a database, the rules for those changed on September 21 — the N4 period is now seven days, not fourteen.

This is general information, not legal advice. If an order about you has already been published and you think it should not have been, that is a conversation worth having properly — call us and we will tell you what your situation specifically requires.