Does Toronto really need an Ombudsman? That question should be carefully considered as the City’s first and current such arbiter of complaints Fiona Crean takes her leave. Ms Crean announced today that she will depart the office created in 2009 by the David Miller administration. Perhaps a careful assessment now will reveal whether the City should sustain this bureaucracy further. There are some who will say the office lends itself to self-involved meditations that mean little to ordinary people. At the Ontario level, Andre Marin seems to run the Ombudsman’s office like a public relations agency. The drama that surrounds his work is embarrassing. Among his greatest boasts is that he received 10,000 complaints about Hydro One. Little surprise when you ask millions of Ontarians if they have a beef with a utility that enters every single house in the province. With a little work, that number could surely have been doubled. At any rate, there is hardly a problem he has addressed which was not in the public sphere before it came to his office. All these things raise the question of just how many Ombud civil servants we need.
