Human Rights Tribunal Hearing Legal Fees

After 2.5 years shut down by COVID-19, Ontario's Human Rights Tribunal is again hearing cases, including MINE.

Despite the shutdown, I have incurred over $14,000 in fees preparing paperwork and witness statements, meetings with The Other Side, etc etc. I have already paid for ALL of this with my own funds and through donations to my previous GoFundMe campaign. Thank you all for the support through some hellish times!

Believe it or not, the bulk of the costs will happen going forward, and UNLIKE legal court cases, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is NOT allowed to award costs. So all this is paid for by me. For the last five years since the original Tribunal papers were filed, I have been fighting for both myself AND all others who are ignored, abused, and dismissed by employers, housing management, and others because we have INVISIBLE DISABLITIES.

As many of you know, it is hard, expensive, and time consuming to fight discrimination, REGARDLESS of whether it's on the grounds of dis/ability, 2SLGBTQAI+ identity, BIPOC, religion....all of us who don't fit into that single, narrow mold. As someone with numerous HIDDEN disabilities as well as other "differences", I have been fighting discrimination most of my life.

My income has become dramatically more precarious since 2017, and I survived both a stroke and car accident in 2018 (the accident LOOKED minor but in fact has had catastrophic and life-altering impacts on my daily life). I can't sort out any of the things still housed in my two lockers, existing only because of the forced dehoarding of my home in 2017 WITH NO ATTENTION OR ACCOMMODATIONS FOR MY DISABILITIES.

Money is tight for everyone right now, and I completely understand. IF you can spare even a very small amount of cash, it all adds up towards paying my Human Rights lawyer's fees.

So far, this debacle has cost me over $33 THOUSAND dollars in locker fees, costs to hire professionals to deal with the imposed, impossible time frame set for me, and a great deal more. What is NOT in that number are costs for lunches or coffee/donuts for my army of volunteers, supplies such as packing tape, contractor bags, colored recycle bags, gas for the folks who drove my volunteers to/from lockers and/or my home, and at LEAST $1,000 more.

It appears the strategy of the Housing Co-Operative in which I live is to keep running up my legal fees until I cave in. They are standing firm on their claim that although Hoarding is a DSM-5 recognized mental illness, it somehow does NOT require accommodations under the Ontario Human Rights Act. (Really??) NOT only is it a massively debilitating condition which impedes the sufferers' daily life, but medical science is closing in on the exact genetic DNA location where the trigger exists. IT'S GENETIC.

Please help me if you can? Most of my life is packed (quite randomly) in boxes. I fully intend to rid myself of most of their contents, but they have to be SORTED so I don't lose family photos, heirlooms, or other precious items. I have to have people helping me at every step, since the 2018 car accident left me with two irreparably damaged rotator cuffs (a previous injury took out one, and the 2018 accident blew out the second - neither can be surgically repaired, either). I can't even lift the darn boxes alone!

Unless my side and the other side can reach an amicable agreement to pay me and stop this process, March 2023 is going to cost me $15,000 OR MORE in unrefundable legal fees.

I hope you can help. If not, please pass this on so someone else can. I am dog-tired of having my Human Rights trampled and abused because "gee, you LOOK just fine". Invisible disabilities are STILL DISABILITIES!!

Thanks for reading my novella, everyone. ❤️