A promising article in The Toronto Star published on March 28th, 2017, written by an investigative reporter announced –
“Province Stripping Tarion of Builder-regulator Role”.
It quoted the Liberal minister saying Tarion’s multiple roles as warranty provider and regulator “can give rise to a perception of conflict of interest, and could result in actual conflict, or conflicts of interest.”
This came as no surprise to many observers.
Consumers and provincial MPPs have known for years that Tarion is the only government agency on the planet to have the two conflicting roles of warranty provider and builder regulator. We can thank former Premier Bill Davis for this in his 1976 legislation. And every Premier after him, for doing nothing to fix this.
Consumers have complained that Tarion favours builders, leaves homeowners to pay for construction defects, and doesn’t properly regulate builders. The two-headed monopoly should end, that was a key recommendation of Judge Cunningham’s Tarion review released in March 2017.
What has the government done since then?
In June, 2017, former Premier Wynne’s government put together a “working group” to hammer out recommendations for new legislation in June 2017. But the 10-person group was skewed toward Tarion and the building industry executives, who vowed to fight the judge’s review, and to keep the monopoly. The group was sworn to secrecy and instructed to ignore several of the judge’s key recommendations.
I was the only consumer advocate in this working group, and was told several times, once in a whispered coffee-break encounter by a former Tarion CEO, and another time openly in the working group by a senior Tarion official, to stop critiquing Tarion’s policies. The whole point of new legislation is to do just that. However, anyone who’s ever critiqued Tarion’s policies will tell you what it’s like to be on the receiving end of their displeasure..
The Liberals finally introduced a weak bill 166, in late 2017. It called for a standalone builder regulator, but was silent on most other areas of consumer protection recommended in the judge’s review. All Opposition parties voted against the bill as lacking in consumer protection legislation. Which it is.
But where is bill 166 now?
Most of us think if a bill is passed, it becomes law. Not so. Why are laws designed to protect the consumer so difficult to understand, even by those who’ve read the 93-page bill several times? Consumer protection laws should have a summary at the beginning to inform consumers what the bill says, and what it means to them, and when it will become law.
I called a friend of mine this week who follows Queen’s Park and legislation very closely, to 
ask him to find out what the current status of the bill is. For us as ordinary citizens, minsters are hard to reach, and they often stay aloof from these questions, unless you’re championing one of their issues du jour, or do something outrageous and get media attention.
Here are five quick points he explained to me:
1) A bill passed by the Legislature comes into force “upon proclamation”, i.e. on a date to be set by Cabinet. It is not law until that date. If Cabinet doesn’t set a date, there’s no law. Some laws may be on the books for years, and never proclaimed. Many bills have been put under review by the new Ford government, if they had not previously been proclaimed.
2) Bill 166 consists of five “schedules”. Each schedule can come into force on a date to be named by Cabinet, the Premier’s inner circle of ministers.
3) For schedules 1 and 2, no date has been named. These will only come into force “upon proclamation”, if a date is set. Schedule 2 is the one which creates two separate entities, but neither of the entities is named. As long as no date is chosen, these schedules are not in force.
4) The current government is under no legal obligation to proclaim anything which has not already been proclaimed. Laws could sit there for years, and ultimately expire. (Even Wynne’s Liberals seem to have been reluctant to proclaim their own bill 166. Maybe they too knew it was a lemon.)
5) Schedule 4 allows for some amendments to the existing New Home Warranties Act, and it came into force when the bill was passed by the Liberals last December 2017, largely due to Opposition parties pushing for this. This allows, in section 5.4, for the Auditor-General to conduct value-for-money audits of Tarion.
This is a ray of light.
No independent authority such as the Auditor-General’s office has ever been able to look at Tarion through the microscope, or analyze its effectiveness or efficiency in carrying out its mandate to protect consumers. Sunshine is a good disinfectant.
Tarion should finally be open to scrutiny, show the public why it denies claims, show if its dispute resolution is impartial, show what it pays executives, and if its board includes any bona fide consumer advocates, etc.
The Auditor-General’s office now has the authority under bill 166 to examine Tarion from a value for money perspective. This audit will apparently be released sometime in 2019.
As for the new PC government, Premier Ford promised to be a leader #ForThePeople , to fight for the little guy. But many of us are seeing strong indications that developers have his ear. His minister’s social media posts show them smiling and socializing with members of the major building lobby groups. Ford is apparently against anything he sees as “anti-business”.
But there’s nothing more anti-business than allowing shoddy builders to sell new homes with construction defects to consumers. No reputable builder would want to do this, or survive in any business doing this.
The problem is Tarion too often shields the bad apples from accountability, uses heavy-lawyering, technicalities of the warranty, and delay tactics to wear down the consumer. This too often results in builders walking away scot free, and the consumer left to pay for their wrong-doing, or facing long, unaffordable legal battles.
The Tarion CEO’s compensation of over a million dollars is made up of 60% bonus, but no one knows what the bonus is based on. With eight builders on Tarion’s board approving it, this is one conflict of interest which begs an answer.
As the Consumer minister said in the 2017 in The Toronto Star article, : “Tarion is too far removed from government”.
True, and that’s bad for business. Without consumer protection, which creates consumer confidence, there will be fewer new home sales.
We have no clear answer why the Ford government is not acting on the legislation by at least choosing a date for proclamation of the other schedules, or announcing it will come with its own bill. Non-answers like we’re studying the issues, etc., are all we have.
The judge’s review already studied Tarion in a year-long review. It takes no more than 3 or 4 hours for an average person to read and understand most of it. Why the delay in implementing it, or even announcing anything whatsoever? The ministry’s website is a big void on this important consumer protection subject.
More years of discussion, debate, and research won’t change the well-known problems with this 40-year old legislation. Many agree with Premier Ford that government shouldn’t have a monopoly in anything. Monopolies are an outdated business model and provide poor service. To open up the new home warranty field for competition would be good for business, and good for the clients of those businesses too. Consumer protection legislation is to protect consumers. Time to do that.
————————-
“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.” – Barack Obama
CONSUMERS' REFORM TARION 
Tarion is not doing a good job at all as a builder regulator, thats becuse it can’t as it is top heavy with builders as board members, this allows shoddy builders to continue building shoddy houses. As for consumer proteprotection, its no different, Tarion is run by builders and unless this changes, consumers will not be protected ever. Justice Cunningham’s report says it all however, our elected officials are ignoring it, and this is all due to political donations from the building industry.
This really does need to be fixed.
We just fought for 4 years with Tarion over $170,000 in deficiencies with our home, including water leaks, heating that didn’t meet code and couldn’t keep our home warm in the winter, and structural defects as severe as support beams not being properly secured.
FOUR YEARS of being forced to live in that house, even after an expert hired by Tarion agreed with us 6 months in. The builder had lied on his permits, avoided city inspections, and defrauded both the inspectors and Tarion – these weren’t accidents. Yet Tarion protected him for 4 years.
So after 4 years we finally get the money we need to repair the problems, fully winning our case and proving the builder was totally at fault. Then we notice that Tarion didn’t list the repairs or deficiencies on the builder directory which is literally the only record Tarion keeps on a builder’s history. They just omitted it completely, essentially hiding the fact this builder broke the law, defrauded us, the city, and Tarion. When we asked why they told us they won’t answer any questions. When we went to the Ombudsman, they said Tarion has the “sole discretion” when to hold a builder in breach of warranty, and what to post on the builder directory, and that decision is not questionable – even though it was literally 100% just to hide the fact this builder had broken the law and defrauded us. The Toronto Star has done it’s own investigation into this and found Tarion routinely hides builder history from that database.
Long story short, Tarion’s builder directory is routinely scrubbed of any and all negative information about builders, so beware and don’t trust it. Tarion needs to be stripped of their builder regulating powers at a minimum, but honestly the people who run it should be brought up on charges. There is clearly documented evidence of Tarion intentionally ignoring builder’s wrong doings and hiding it from the public, while claiming they keep a public record of a builder’s history. That is fraud. That is illegal. And in a truly fair country/province the executives responsible for this would be in jail.
The losses which I had encountered with our custom home construction in 1999 cause irreversible financial losses. The contractor’s contempt for his customers was enabled by the involvement of Tarion. We engaged lawyers who mimicked the Keystone Cops…….and compounded our financial losses.
Yet municipal officials ‘knew off the record’…. both this contractor and Tarion, as did various tradesmen, suppliers and professionals. No one dared to challenge the Deep State!
I bought my house in 2016. My hardwood floors dented very badly the day we moved it. The boards weren’t climatized and the stain was coming off. The installer of the floors came (about 9 months later) and said in from of the builders worker “these floors are 💯 faulty” the builders worker was told to lie about that visit and he quit. I paid 5000 for one room of hardwood that was bad before we moved in. Tarion came and said it was my fault for washing the floor with water! I had hardwood in my previous home and I washed the floors for 10 years the same way with zero problems. It’s a joke. We didn’t have our proper pre inspections and the day we were moving in there was workers everywhere and one said “well the hardwood floors look better from up here” Tarion is a flipping joke and so is my builder!
One of several deficiencies with our builder was also with the hardwood floors. We specified before construction the grade and price per sq. ft. of the oak hardwood at Home Depot. The builder substituted ‘tavern grade’ hardwood, not displayed at hardware stores, at a substantially lower price. The Tarion inspector said at our home ‘that is the normal grade of hardwood that this builder provides in his homes’. Tarion ignored the fact that ‘tavern grade’ was an unauthorized substitution…a breach of contract. Tarion also lied because another home by that same builder had the grade that we had specified.
Our builder as it turned out had an extensive notoriety….made possible by whom? Oh yes…there were more issues, lies and cover up.