Taxpayers drowning in the seas of bureaucracy

By Douglas Glynn Midland Free Press August 9 2012

In the past three years, 1,438 people from across Ontario — with nowhere else to turn — have complained to the Ontario Ombudsman about a wide range of municipal government issues, only to discover that he can’t help them.

Andre Marin can’t help because he has no authority to consider complaints about municipal governments, except as a closed-meeting investigator.

Some municipalities, including the County of Simcoe, don’t want Marin looking into what they have been doing behind closed doors. Instead, they are spending taxpayers’ dollars needlessly to hire private companies to carry out investigations that Ontario residents already pay Marin to do through their provincial taxes.

But municipalities have deep pockets; pockets filled with taxpayers’ dollars and some politicians aren’t reluctant to spend those dollars to keep the fox — as Marin has been described — out of the hen house.

Since he can’t investigate how municipalities treat their citizens, politicians and bureaucrats have little to fear.

Where does all this leave the lowly taxpayer?

If he or she has a complaint that cannot be fairly resolved by dealing with the municipality, their only recourse is to hire a lawyer and face the expense of going to court.

That is a deterrent that the folks who run city halls often rely on.

Unfortunately, no one keeps statistics about the number of people forced, for financial reasons, to abandon a dispute with local government. But if the pleas for help being received by the Ombudsman are any indication, many people are, to use his words, adrift in the “stormy seas of bureaucracy.”

Four Canadian provinces and one territory allow their ombudsman to investigate complaints about municipalities.

Despite Marin’s requests to allow his office to investigate complaints about municipalities, hospitals, universities, school boards, long-term care homes, children’s aid societies and the police, the Ontario government persists in denying taxpayers access to an advocate funded by their own tax dollars.