Sakura and Naomi built a practice, then a stalled ruling nearly cost them their financing

The situation

Sakura and Naomi had known each other since their first jobs out of school, Sakura in accounting, Naomi training as a chiropractor, and when the timing finally lined up they leased a small shared space in Ajax together, Sakura running the bookkeeping and tax side out of the front office and Naomi seeing patients in the back. It was a partnership built on more than a decade of trust, and for the first several years it ran the way they had hoped it would.

That trust extended to the person they hired to manage day-to-day bookkeeping and scheduling for both sides of the practice, Suresh, who worked with them for about three years before a dispute over his hours and eventual dismissal led him to file a complaint with the ministry body that handles employment standards disputes. Suresh alleged he had been owed significant unpaid overtime and had been let go in a way that entitled him to further compensation. Sakura and Naomi disputed both claims, believing the hours in question reflected time Suresh had chosen to spend on personal matters during work hours, not overtime worked.

The hearing itself proceeded in a single day, with both sides represented and the adjudicator reserving a decision at the end of it, which is ordinary practice. What was not ordinary was how long the decision took to arrive. Months passed, then more months, well beyond the time such decisions usually take, with no ruling and no clear explanation from the tribunal's office about the delay.

The timing became genuinely urgent when Sakura and Naomi needed to refinance the practice's lease and equipment loans, together worth somewhere between three hundred fifty and eight hundred thousand dollars, to fund an expansion into a second treatment room. Their lender wanted the outstanding employment complaint resolved, or at minimum a clear picture of the exposure, before approving the new financing. With money already tight after years of steady but modest growth, an open-ended wait was not something the business could simply absorb, and every additional week of silence from the tribunal made the lender visibly more nervous about the whole arrangement.

The complication

The core complication was not the underlying employment dispute itself, which was a fairly ordinary disagreement over hours and severance that either side could have lived with losing within reason. The complication was that an administrative decision-maker had, for reasons never explained to the parties, gone silent for far longer than the process was supposed to take, leaving Sakura and Naomi in limbo on a financing decision that could not wait indefinitely for a ruling that might come at any point.

Administrative tribunals are generally expected to decide matters within a reasonable time after a hearing concludes. What counts as reasonable varies by tribunal and by the complexity of the case, but an unexplained delay stretching well past the norm, with no indication of when a decision might actually arrive, can in some circumstances be challenged directly. The available remedy is a court application asking for an order compelling the tribunal to do what it is legally obligated to do: decide the matter and release its ruling.

This is a narrow and somewhat unusual tool. Courts are generally reluctant to interfere with how administrative bodies manage their own caseloads, and an application of this kind is not a way to pressure a tribunal toward a particular outcome, only toward actually reaching one. The applicant has to show the delay is genuinely excessive relative to the tribunal's own normal practice, that no reasonable explanation has been offered, and that the delay is causing real, demonstrable harm rather than simple frustration at having to wait.

For Sakura, the harm was concrete and provable: a signed financing term sheet contingent on resolution of the complaint, a lender's letter confirming the condition, and a closing date that would lapse if the decision did not arrive in time. That combination, an unusually long delay plus a specific, documented cost attached to it, was what made a mandatory order a realistic option rather than simply an expression of impatience with a slow process.

What we did

1. Documented the timeline of the delay precisely, setting out the exact date of the hearing, the date a decision was reserved, and every week that passed after it, and comparing that timeline against the tribunal's own publicly stated service standards for how long a decision of this kind ordinarily takes. That gave the court an objective benchmark for what counted as excessive delay, rather than asking a judge to accept, on Sakura and Naomi's word alone, that the wait had gone on too long.
2. Gathered concrete evidence of the financial harm, including the lender's conditional term sheet, the correspondence confirming the financing was contingent on resolving the complaint, and the closing date that would lapse without a ruling. A mandatory order is far more persuasive when a court can see a specific, dated, provable cost attached to the delay, rather than being asked to act on general inconvenience or frustration with a slow process.
3. Wrote to the tribunal directly requesting a status update before commencing any court application, both because it was the proportionate first step a court would expect to see tried, and because the tribunal's response, or its silence, became part of the record. That step mattered later, since it showed the delay had been raised directly with the decision-maker and gone unanswered, not simply assumed to be unreasonable without ever asking.
4. Kept the application narrowly focused on the delay itself, deliberately avoiding any argument about how the tribunal should ultimately rule on Suresh's underlying complaint. Asking a court to compel a decision is a fundamentally different request from asking it to dictate what that decision should say, and blurring the two would have invited exactly the kind of judicial reluctance to interfere with a tribunal's process that this application needed to avoid.
5. Managed costs carefully given the tight budget, using written argument wherever the process allowed rather than booking a lengthy oral hearing, and limiting the evidentiary record to the timeline and financial documents that actually mattered to the application. Every additional exhibit or affidavit had to earn its place, since Sakura and Naomi could not afford a filing built on volume rather than precision.
6. Filed the application and served the tribunal and Suresh as the affected parties, giving both a clear, documented opportunity to respond before any hearing took place. Serving Suresh directly, rather than treating the application as a matter only between the business and the tribunal, strengthened the fairness of the process and reduced the risk of a later procedural objection that the application had been brought without proper notice.
7. Coordinated with the lender to extend the financing deadline briefly once the application was filed, using the fact of the filing itself as evidence the delay was being actively addressed. That bought just enough additional time for the tribunal to respond without the practice losing the financing outright while the application worked its way toward a hearing date, and it kept the lender engaged as a cooperative partner rather than one preparing to walk away from the deal entirely.

The outcome

Within a short period after the application was formally issued and served, the tribunal released its decision. The ruling favoured Sakura and Naomi on the central overtime claim, finding Suresh's hours did not support the amount he had claimed, though it awarded him a modest amount tied to the manner of his dismissal, an amount well within what the business had budgeted for as a possible worst case throughout the process. The written decision, once it finally arrived, ran to several pages and addressed the overtime question in some detail, giving no obvious indication of what had caused it to sit unfinished for as long as it had.

With the decision finally in hand, the financing closed on the extended timeline the lender had agreed to, and the practice's expansion proceeded largely as originally planned, delayed by a few months but not derailed. The lender's own condition, that the complaint be resolved or its exposure clearly known before approving the new loan, was satisfied the moment the ruling came down, and underwriting moved quickly once that condition was cleared. The mandatory order application itself did not need to proceed to a full hearing on its merits, since the tribunal's decision arrived once the application was on file, though the costs and effort of preparing it were not wasted, since it was very likely the reason the decision arrived when it did.

Sakura and Naomi never learned exactly why the tribunal's decision had taken as long as it did, and no formal finding was ever made about the reason for the delay itself, since the application became unnecessary to pursue further once its purpose was achieved. What mattered practically was that a tight budget forced a narrow, well-documented application rather than a broader, more expensive fight, and that narrow approach turned out to be exactly what the situation called for. The second treatment room opened later that year, and the practice's relationship with its lender, tested but not broken by the delay, continued on into the next round of financing without the same complications.

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