Greg Joy’s legacy is no longer his high-jump silver medal at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. His legacy is now the thousands of eviction orders he has handed on a silver platter to landlords as the longest sitting adjudicator at the LTB.

Greg Joy’s first stint at the LTB lasted 11 years, from 2005 to 2016. After taking a few years off, he came out of retirement and got back in the eviction game during Ford’s frenzy of political appointees to prepare for the LTB’s eviction “blitz.” Joy was appointed on July 23, 2020, a week before the first eviction moratorium was lifted.

Greg Joy’s LTB orders are riddled with typos. Is he in such a hurry to order tenants be thrown out of their homes that he doesn’t even bother proofreading his own work?

In his run for provincial office in 1995 under Mike Harris’ Progressive Conservatives, Greg Joy tried to reignite the abortion debate and follow through on his personal opposition to abortion by promising to close Ottawa’s Morgentaler Clinic, the only freestanding abortion clinic in the city at the time. This position was too extreme for Mike Harris, who had to backtrack on Joy’s statement. While Joy lost his bid for the PC seat in Ottawa West, his former leader Harris, as Premier, went on to make some of the most drastic cuts to tenant protections in Ontario’s history. If Joy had won his seat, he would’ve been part of that team. Instead, he gets to directly increase the suffering of tenants by sentencing them to homelessness.

Joy was also the Executive Director of the Ottawa Food Bank. In spite of record numbers of clients during his time at the Food Bank during the Harris era, Joy still pushed for and supported further cuts to the Food Bank. His approach to dealing with struggling working-class people is unforgiving, and with his many years of service at the board, he now has a storied legacy that would make him a contender for issuing record numbers of orders against tenants.