The HRTO Consultation Just Closed — What Ontario Employers Should Do Before the New Rules Land

On June 5, 2026, the public consultation window on the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario's Rules of Procedure quietly closed. There was no press release, no enforcement deadline, no penalty for missing it. For most Ontario employers, the date passed without notice.

That is precisely the problem. The window to influence the rules is now over. The window to prepare for them is wide open — and the employers who use it will be the ones whose harassment and discrimination files hold up when the finalized rules land.

This post is the operational follow-on to our coverage of the consultation when it opened on May 13. That earlier piece was about getting your submission in. This one is about what to do now that submissions are closed and the Tribunal moves to finalize.

What just happened

The HRTO's consultation on updates to its Rules of Procedure and Practice Directions ran from May 13 to June 5, 2026. It invited feedback on five things: a brand-new Practice Direction on Mandatory Mediation, a refined process for reviewing reconsideration requests, clarified timelines and submission processes for Notices of Intent to Dismiss an application, a simplified process for withdrawing applications by email, and adjustments to how the Tribunal handles jurisdictional review.

With the window closed, the Tribunal now reviews what it received — including submissions from the Ontario Bar Association and other stakeholders — and finalizes the rules. The HRTO's most recent comparable cycle, the June 1, 2025 rules update, moved from announcement to in-force in a matter of weeks, not years. Employers should plan on the finalized rules arriving on a similar timeline.

The change that actually matters

Four of the five consultation items are procedural housekeeping. The fifth is not.

The Mandatory Mediation Practice Direction formalizes the regime that has already governed every HRTO file since June 1, 2025: mediation is scheduled automatically in every application after jurisdictional screening, not offered as a voluntary option. Codifying it in a Practice Direction does two things. It removes the remaining ambiguity about when and how mediation happens, and it signals that the Tribunal intends to run this regime as permanent infrastructure rather than a pilot.

For Ontario employers, the practical consequence has not changed since the regime began — but the finalized Practice Direction will harden it. Mediation lands early in a file's life, often before the internal investigation has fully closed. The investigation record is on the table from the first mediation conversation. And on files where that record is procedurally weak, settlement expectations sit higher.

What it means for Ontario employers

The mediation regime has quietly become a stress test for HR. Every harassment, sexual harassment, discrimination, or reprisal file that becomes an HRTO application now gets pulled into a mediation conversation within months — and the quality of the underlying investigation is the single biggest variable in how that conversation goes.

The Tribunal is not assessing your investigation in the abstract. It is assessing whether your employer met its obligations under the Ontario Human Rights Code to provide a workplace free from discrimination and harassment, and whether the response to the concern was reasonable in the circumstances. A file that documents a contemporaneous threshold assessment, an independent investigator, and a clear findings report walks into mediation from a position of strength. A file that is reconstructed after the mediation notice arrives does not.

This is the same standard the Code's duty to investigate has been pushing toward for two years. The finalized HRTO rules simply give it a faster, more predictable forum.

What to do now

The finalized rules are not in force yet. Use the gap.

1. Pressure-test your open files. Pull every active harassment, sexual harassment, and discrimination matter in your organization. For each, ask one question: if a mediation notice arrived next month, would this file survive the conversation? A file survives when it has a contemporaneous threshold-assessment record, an investigator with no reporting line into the respondent's chain, and a findings report documenting what was investigated, concluded, and corrected. If a file is missing any of the three, fix it now — not after the notice arrives.

2. Pre-authorize a settlement envelope. Under the mandatory regime, settlement preparation cannot wait for the mediation date. Build a written settlement-authority document that maps a monetary and non-monetary range to file type, allegation seriousness, and the strength of the investigation record. Put it in the same file as the threshold assessment and the investigation report so it moves with the file through HR turnover and counsel changes.

3. Make threshold assessment routine. Most employer failures we see are not failures of investigation — they are failures of the assessment that should sit in front of the investigation decision. Build a documented threshold assessment into the way HR triages every concern that reaches the function, not only the ones that arrive as formal complaints. This is the upstream discipline of what "appropriate in the circumstances" actually requires.

4. Brief your leadership before the rules land. When the finalized Practice Direction publishes, the executive question will be "are we ready?" The honest answer depends on work done now. A short brief to your leadership team — open file count, file-quality status, settlement-authority posture — turns the eventual rule change from a surprise into a status update.

5. Confirm your investigator bench. A regime that puts the investigation record on the mediation table within months rewards employers who can investigate quickly and defensibly. If your only options are an overstretched HR generalist or a full law-firm engagement for every matter, you have a capacity gap that the mandatory regime will expose. Resolve it before the next file arrives, not during it.

How 1205 helps

We run external workplace investigations across Ontario in the harassment, sexual harassment, discrimination, and reprisal space, built to the procedural standard the HRTO's mandatory mediation regime now applies. Brought in early, the investigation file is built to survive the mediation conversation. Brought in late, we work alongside employer counsel to triage the file, reconstruct the contemporaneous record where that is possible, and position the corrective action for mediation.

If you have an HRTO application on a member of your team with a mediation date on the calendar — or open harassment matters and no confidence the files would survive the next mediation — book a 30-minute call and we will work through what each file needs.

If you are upstream of all that and want a faster read on whether your current investigation posture matches the standard the Tribunal is applying, the investigation assessment is a better first move than waiting for a notice to arrive.

Learn more about our workplace investigations practice or our HR Services offering for an ongoing HR partnership. For employer-side perspective on the broader Ontario landscape, firms like Hicks Morley publish regularly on HRTO practice and the duty to investigate.

This post is not legal advice. The decisions on whether to participate in mediation, what posture to take, and what settlement terms to accept should run through your employment counsel.