A New Petition Calls for Doug Downey to Resign
The Ontario government has a peculiar posture towards online petitions. I share some of what we learned at SOLO about them.
A new petition is out calling for the resignation of Ontario’s Attorney General, Doug Downey. This petition was started by Ontario Landlord Watch’s Kayla Andrade. You should check it out. While there are no hard numbers in this petition, it does hit on all of the struggles that a poorly run Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) have inflicted on everyone involved. Calling for the leader to resign may only bring in a new, worse, Attorney General, but it make sense people would want him to take responsibility.
This might also seem like an unusual time to bring about a petition given that the LTB has been making some headway on cases. They’ve focused on non-payment cases and brought the “time-to-hearing” down from more than eight months to three. However, the one statistic from the LTB that should be of relevance is their backlog reduction speed. Over the past year or so, they’ve had middling success and recently fell off.
This is of most relevance because the LTB is fighting a total backlog or queue of about 50,000 cases. For them to reduce the wait in totality, they have to resolve many more cases than come in. The number of cases coming in continues to rise. The statistics show the LTB is plodding along. The reduction in non-payment wait times may be a PR win, but the overall look is of losing.
But, back to petitions. There has been some significant success in gaining signatories. One needs to look at Chris Seepe’s We Demand Automatic Eviction petition to see it was signed by 42,156 (at the time of writing). In it’s time, the petition garnered Seepe speaking events and appearances on Canada’s largest media outlets. That link must have been shared about a million times across every landlord association an site. There have been many others to varying different degrees of success.
Yet, nothing has really changed.
Why? Because in Ontario petitions need to be signed and on paper when brought to the government. As explained by the rules of petitions at the Legislative Assembly, “All signatures must be original.” This immediately rules out any online or digital petition immediately.
At some point I had the idea that we could create an online document that stated a petition’s goals, such as something you might see on Docusign. People would be required to draw their signatures and then we’d print those and present them to the government. Well, no. The arcane set of rules are clear, “They must be written directly on the petition.”
Should these rules change to reflect our new realities? Yes. Is it worthwhile then, to sign a digital petition? Yes, it can be an avenue to get noticed. The trouble is that making change seems to require a delicate, often esoteric mix of things that need to be accounted for.
Please check out Kayla’s interview on Gary Hibbert’s podcast Real Talk With Gary. It’s a great interview, with part two coming soon. More than anything, get involved. Talk to others. Make it a priority to work towards positive and lasting change.
Thank you for reading. I invite you to share or forward this to anyone that might be interested in this newsletter. Happy to answer any questions you might have.