A Landlord or Lender Pulled Your Credit: Your Rights Under Ontario’s Consumer Reporting Act

A credit check isn’t one faceless system. Two parties handle your information — the one who used the report and the agency that keeps your file — and Ontario law gives you a different set of things to ask of each.

I’m Arthur Zhao, a Toronto real estate broker. Pull your own credit file, scroll to the access log, and you’ll see something that is easy to overlook: a list of names — companies and individuals — who have looked at your file, some of them in connection with a rental application or a mortgage you once put in. Behind that list are really only two kinds of party. One is whoever used a report about you — a landlord screening a tenant, a lender sizing up a mortgage. The other is the credit reporting agency that assembled the file and keeps it. Ontario’s Consumer Reporting Act gives you a distinct set of things to ask of each one. This walks through both — who owes you what, and how to ask.

You’re not dealing with one faceless system

It’s easy to picture a credit check as one anonymous machine passing judgment on you. In Ontario it isn’t. The Consumer Reporting Act (R.S.O. 1990, c. C.33) splits the picture into two parties, and it hands you a different set of rights against each. On one side is whoever used a report about you — the landlord deciding whether to rent to you, the lender deciding whether to fund your mortgage. On the other is the credit reporting agency that assembled the file and answered their request. The rest of this article is organized exactly that way: what you can ask the user, then what you can ask the agency.

Party one: whoever used your report

The Act starts by limiting when an agency may hand your report to someone at all. A landlord, for example, can be given one only where the purpose is entering into or renewing a tenancy agreement (s.8(1)(d)(ii)); other permitted purposes include extending credit, employment and insurance. Once someone is allowed to use a report, they owe you notice:

• They must tell you a report was or will be used. If you ask — in writing or in person — anyone must confirm whether a consumer report was or is to be used in your transaction, and give you the name and address of the agency that supplied it (s.10(1)).
• Advance notice for a fuller report. Before obtaining a report that contains personal information — or making a pre-inquiry on someone who hasn’t applied for credit — the user must first give you written notice (s.10(2)).
• At the credit application itself. A lender must tell you, when you apply, that it will refer to a report containing only your credit information (s.10(3)).

In plain terms: nobody is supposed to quietly pull a full report on you without a heads-up, and you can always ask who supplied it.

The strongest thing you can ask the user: “why?”

The most useful right against the user kicks in when the answer is no. If a landlord or lender refuses you, or charges you more — a higher deposit, a worse rate — because of credit information, they must tell you so at the time they deliver the decision. And if you ask within 60 days, they must give you the source of the information, or the name and address of the credit reporting agency behind it (s.10(7)). That’s your thread to pull: it tells you which file to go read, and where.

The user vs the agency: who owes you what

Party two: the agency that keeps your file

The second party is the credit reporting agency itself — the one that built the file and answered the landlord’s or lender’s request. You have a standing right to see what it holds. On written request (which may be electronic), you can obtain your own consumer report, or your consumer score together with the report (s.12(1),(2)); the score-disclosure duty, though, only applies to agencies designated by regulation (s.12(4.1)). What it must disclose is specific (s.12(3)):

• the nature and substance of all information in your file;
• the sources of the credit information;
• the name and phone number of every person who accessed your file on someone’s behalf in the past 3 years; and
• for anyone given a report in the past year, that recipient’s name and phone number, plus a copy or the content of what was sent.

Along with the disclosure, the agency must tell you about your right to dispute what’s in the file and how to do it (s.12(5)). It generally can’t charge you for this, except where a regulation allows — for example a repeat electronic request in the same month, or a third non-electronic score request in a year (s.12(13)–(15)). It also can’t make you sign away any right as a condition of disclosure (s.12(16)). And if you supply what’s needed and ask for an electronic copy, and no regulation sets a different clock, it has two business days to send it (s.12(7)(8)).

Fixing what’s wrong

That correction right starts with s.13(1): if you believe something in your file is inaccurate or incomplete, you can dispute it, and the agency must within a reasonable time use its best efforts to check and then correct, supplement or delete the information. The backward notice in s.13(2) is what gives the dispute teeth — otherwise a fix today would do nothing about the landlord who already turned you down last month. Note the division of labour, though: the agency fixes the file. Whether a landlord reconsiders a decision, or whether a rental dispute goes further, is a separate matter — for the landlord, the Landlord and Tenant Board, or a lawyer, not the credit bureau.

Two more things you can require of the agency

Your own look doesn’t count against you. Exercising your right to see your file cannot be used to calculate your consumer score (s.12.0.1(3)). That’s the statute’s answer to the worry that “checking my own credit lowers it” — reading your own file, through this right, is not a mark against you. (The Act doesn’t get into industry definitions of soft versus hard inquiries; this is the specific protection it does give.)

The security freeze. Agencies designated by regulation must, on your request, place a security freeze on your file. While it’s in place the agency can’t release your file for a set list of purposes — opening new credit, increasing a credit limit, a real estate mortgage, an automobile lease, and other transactions named by regulation (s.12.4). Read that list carefully: a tenancy is not on it. A freeze is a real tool against new-credit fraud in your name, but it is not designed to sit between you and a landlord’s tenancy screening.