Articles

Imagine you are an Ontario municipal councillor, perusing the agenda for your next meeting, and you see that a new report by the municipality’s integrity commissioner is scheduled to be discussed behind closed doors. You wonder, is that appropriate?

Ontario municipalities and its citizens are marking an important anniversary with the arrival of this new year. It has been exactly 10 years since they embarked upon what was heralded as a "new era" in municipal accountability - an era that is still evolving.

There are many communities that have for years decried a crisis of confidence in Ontario police. The province’s much-anticipated new omnibus policing legislation, packaged as the Safer Ontario Act, 2017, appears to have been met with general optimism — perhaps as much a measure of the broad need and desire for change as it is of the bill itself.

As Ontario’s ombudsman, my job is to make the government work better for you.

The role of an ombudsman is to promote accountability, transparency, and fairness in the public sector. This mandate is fulfilled by receiving citizens’ complaints about a branch of government or a public sector body, determining whether the complaint has merit, and if so, working collaboratively with stakeholders to get the problem resolved.

Recently, it took just four minutes for David Orazietti, Ontario’s Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services, to announce changes that will fundamentally affect law and order across the province.

Some 40 years after the first Ontario Ombudsman called for it – and 13 months after it was formally passed into law – municipalities in this province now come under the jurisdiction of the Ombudsman’s office. For the first time, Ontarians who have complaints related to municipal government have the same recourse to the independent, impartial services of their Ombudsman as they do when they have complaints about provincial government bodies.

On January 1, 2016, citizens of Ontario will finally be able to bring their municipal complaints to their provincial Ombudsman. For readers in B.C., New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Yukon, this won’t seem like news – their ombudsmen have long had jurisdiction over municipalities, dealing with complaints about everything from misuse of public funds to bylaw changes.