Two screening practices feel like diligence and create more exposure than almost anything else a small landlord does: criminal record checks, and shared bad-tenant lists.

Neither is straightforwardly illegal. Both sit in territory where privacy commissioners have taken positions, one federal investigation has already landed, and the human rights risk runs underneath the whole thing.

Here is the actual position, and the screening process replacing both.

Criminal record checks

Ontario: the Human Rights Code lists record of offences as a protected ground in employment. It is not listed as a ground in housing, so a refusal based on a criminal record is not directly prohibited by the Code in a tenancy. The mechanics are governed separately by the Police Record Checks Reform Act — checks cannot be requested without the individual's knowledge and consent, and results go to the individual first, to confirm accuracy before authorizing release. Vulnerable sector checks are restricted to positions of trust over vulnerable people, so a landlord cannot obtain one.

British Columbia: criminal or summary conviction is protected in employment and union membership, not tenancy. But the privacy analysis is what bites — BC's commissioner takes the position criminal record checks will in most situations be neither necessary nor reasonable under the province's privacy act, justified only in narrow circumstances such as an on-site childcare facility.

Alberta: least settled of the three. Criminal record is not a protected ground in tenancy under the Alberta Human Rights Act. Alberta's privacy commissioner states it might not be reasonable for landlords to request a criminal record under the province's privacy act. No decision squarely on point was found.

The practical barrier in all three: you cannot pull a police check on someone else. The applicant has to attend their local police service or use an accredited provider, pay the fee, receive the result and hand it over voluntarily. The process is slow, self-selecting, and easy to forge — a supplied police check PDF is among the simplest documents to fake.

The risk running underneath all of it: even where record of offences is not a listed housing ground, a blanket criminal-record policy produces adverse-effect discrimination on protected grounds — race, disability including addiction, and Indigenous identity. The exposure is live in every province, and it does not depend on the Code listing the ground directly.

The defensible position is straightforward. Do not run criminal record checks as a routine screening step. If a specific, documented circumstance makes one genuinely necessary, get advice first.

Bad-tenant lists

The federal privacy commissioner investigated a property management company's bad tenant list and found three things: it amounted to unlicensed consumer reporting; a vague application clause broadly authorizing credit reports and other information deemed necessary was not valid consent; and tenants had no way to access or challenge what was recorded about them.

The finding was well-founded and resolved. The company destroyed the list.

The same reasoning reaches the informal version — a landlord Facebook group where people post names, a shared spreadsheet, a subscription to a commercial aggregator of tribunal orders. Compiling or subscribing to a database of tenant records for screening purposes looks like consumer reporting, which triggers provincial registration requirements, and the people on the list have no access or correction rights.

Searching one applicant's name in a public tribunal database yourself, with consent naming the purpose, is defensible. Participating in a list is not.

What replaces both

A written scorecard, applied identically to every applicant, decided before you advertise.

This is not a softer version of screening. It is a stricter one, and it produces better decisions than gut feel does, because gut feel is where bias operates without anyone noticing.

Building the scorecard

Write the criteria before the listing goes live — deciding your standard while looking at a specific applicant is how a standard becomes a rationalization.

• Use verifiable criteria — verified income relative to rent using a reasonable measure rather than a fixed ratio, length of employment or stability of income, rental history verified with a previous landlord, payment history on the credit report read through the R-ratings rather than the score alone, completeness and consistency of the application.
• Avoid criteria producing indirect discrimination — a fixed rent-to-income ratio was found discriminatory in Ontario in 1998 and the reasoning has not moved. Requiring Canadian credit history excludes newcomers. Requiring long employment tenure excludes people in seasonal or gig work. Requiring a guarantor from some applicants and not others is discrimination unless the trigger is the same for everyone.
• Weight the criteria — verified rental history and verified income should carry more than the credit score, because they predict better.
• Score every applicant on the same sheet, in the same order, at the same time, after applications close.
• Write one line of reasoning per decision the day you make it — "Declined: previous landlord confirmed four months arrears in 2025" is a defensible record. A memory of a feeling is not.

The consistency test

Ask yourself one question about every screening step: would I do this for every applicant.

If the answer is no, you have found the problem. Running a credit check on some applicants and not others, asking for a guarantor from some and not others, calling references for some and not others, or searching tribunal records selectively is where a process stops being a process.

Consistency is the entire defence. A landlord applying the same process to everyone and writing down why they chose who they chose is in a strong position at a tribunal. A landlord deciding case by case from memory is not, regardless of how fair their actual reasoning was.

What to do with a marginal applicant

Options exist between yes and no, and all of them have to be applied consistently.

• A guarantor, where credit or rental information is genuinely unavailable or poor, with the same trigger for everyone.
• A larger deposit, only where your province permits it — Ontario does not, Alberta caps at one month including any pet deposit, and BC caps security and pet damage deposits at half a month each.
• A shorter initial term, where the tenancy rules in your province make it workable.
• Additional verification, such as a bank-generated income letter, requested from anyone whose file has the same gap.

What is not an option is quietly declining and telling yourself it was about something else. The unwritten decision is the one producing complaints.

The record to keep

For every vacancy: the written criteria, the scorecard for every applicant, one line of reasoning per decision, and the applications themselves for your stated retention period.

The file takes ten minutes to build during the process and is close to impossible to reconstruct afterward. It is also the only thing standing between you and a complaint you cannot answer.

LuxOasisOS runs every applicant through the same form and the same record, so the scorecard and the reasoning live with the application rather than in your head.