He waited years to file, then the bus video undercut his story
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A Toronto Transit Commission bus driver who said he was fired and sidelined because he is Black has lost his discrimination case, after a tribunal ruled the complaint came years too late and that video of the incident at its centre did not match his account.
The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario dismissed the application on May 20, 2026. Adjudicator Lavinia Inbar found that Mark Lindsay, who represented himself, had filed most of his allegations against the TTC well outside the Human Rights Code's one-year limit, and that even on the merits his claims of racial discrimination, a poisoned workplace and reprisal could not be made out. The Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 113, took part as an intervenor. No damages were ordered.
A fare dispute that ended in punches
The case traces back to August 2015, when Lindsay was driving a TTC bus. Two young men boarded, then left after a heated exchange. Lindsay got off the bus and went after them. He was criminally charged with assault, though the Crown withdrew the charge about a year later.
The TTC dismissed him. Through a Last Chance Agreement reached in a union grievance, he later returned to work in non-public-facing roles in the revenue department. Lindsay argued he had been pressured into signing and that the deal reflected racial and cultural bias, but the tribunal found nothing beyond his own assertions to support that.
The video evidence was central. The footage showed Lindsay leaving the bus and going after the two men as they stood on the sidewalk, repeatedly punching one of them, and the tribunal found it was not consistent with his version of events. Asked what caused the bruising on his wrist, Lindsay said his "knuckle contacted [the young male's] face or mouth or something."
Years of complaints, filed too late
Lindsay filed his application on October 17, 2019, but most of what he raised dated from 2015 to 2018. Under the Code, applicants generally have one year from the last incident of discrimination to come forward. Inbar found there was no independent incident inside that window to anchor the older allegations.
When the form asked why he was filing late, Lindsay pointed to "ongoing systemic, racist, homophobic, behaviour over the past 2 ½ years." The tribunal treated that as a list of allegations rather than an explanation for the delay, and noted he offered nothing further.
The delay was lengthy, more than four years after the 2015 incident he was most aggrieved about. Because he had not shown the delay was incurred in good faith, Inbar ruled, the application had to be dismissed on that ground alone.
Why the complaint fell apart
Inbar weighed the merits anyway. Lindsay self-identifies as a Black male, and she accepted his termination and reassignment may have caused him some disadvantage. But she found no persuasive evidence that race or any other protected ground was a factor in how he was treated.
Credibility was a recurring issue. Lindsay's account of a 2019 revenue bin incident, in which coworkers said he pushed a full bin into a colleague's leg, differed sharply from theirs, and a coworker who testified supported the colleagues' version. A one-day unpaid suspension and an order to take sensitivity training followed; an earlier suspension over the same matter had been with pay.
Inbar drew a sharp line between unfairness and discrimination. Her reasons leaned heavily on the contemporaneous memos, occurrence reports and video the employer had retained, which the tribunal preferred wherever Lindsay's account diverged. And she confined the Code's reach to protected grounds, noting that "the Tribunal does not have jurisdiction over general allegations of unfairness unrelated to the Code."
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