A human rights tribunal has refused a request by a Brampton landlord to reconsider an earlier ruling that found he discriminated against his Muslim tenants by failing to accommodate their religious rights.

In April, John Alabi was ordered by the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario to take online courses on human rights and rental housing, and pay his former tenants, Walid Madkour and his wife, Heba Ismail, $12,000 in damages.

The tribunal found the landlord failed to respect the couple’s prayer times by giving enough notice before showing their apartment to prospective tenants; refusing to remove his shoes when entering the premises and especially the prayer space; and harassing them partly because of their religiously-based accommodation requests.

Alabi immediately filed a request to the tribunal to reconsider the decision, claiming there was new evidence in the case and arguing the adjudicator at the hearing was biased against him.

In an 8-page decision on the landlord’s appeal, adjudicator Jo-Anne Pickel said a request for reconsideration would only be granted if there are new facts that could potentially be determinative of the case and that couldn’t have been available previously; if a party did not receive notice of the proceeding; and if there were procedural errors.

“A request for reconsideration is not an opportunity to reargue a case or to change the way a party presented its case,” Pickel wrote in denying Alabi’s request. “Once the tribunal has made a decision in a case, parties are entitled to treat the matter as closed, subjected to limited exceptions.”

Pickel dismissed the submission of an email by Alabi’s wife as new evidence because it could have “reasonably” been obtained earlier and he had already filed a witness statement for his wife in this case.

Alabi “took issue with my findings of credibility in this case. Among other things, he claimed that he was prejudiced in giving his testimony because he was grieving at the time and I had denied his adjournment request. He also stated that I did not take into consideration the fact that English is not his first language,” wrote Pickel.

“Disagreement with (an adjudicator’s) findings of credibility is not a ground for reconsideration. . . The issue with his testimony was not his ability to speak English; it was the fact that his testimony was neither internally consistent nor consistent with his pleadings or other documentary evidence.”

Madkour and Ismail, immigrants from Egypt, moved into the apartment owned by Alabi, a Nigerian native, in December 2014 and agreed a month later to move out of the unit by Feb. 28, 2015 due to issues with the temperature of the apartment, the use of the internet and the request for a quiet environment at night.

The human rights complaint was based on the events and correspondence between the couple and the landlord when the landlord began planning viewings of the apartment to prospective tenants in late February.

Alabi’s lawyer, Yuce Baykara, said his client was disappointed with the decision and will appeal the case to the Ontario Divisional Court, “as there are grounds to his breach of natural justice, and based on some of the findings in this matter (that) are substantially incorrect on its face.”