Toronto — Every time someone looks into a government closet in Ontario a skeleton falls out, and residents must be wondering if any branch of government works properly.
The recent examples include Ombudsman Andre Marin’s review of the Special Investigations Unit, which was set up to probe incidents in which someone is killed or seriously injured by police to avoid police being shown favoritism, and has boasted it is “a world leader” in this balancing act.
The Ombudsman found its investigators, mostly former police officers, are too timid and deferential toward police to do their job effectively and government after government has been content if they soothe police and the community rather than investigate effectively. This is not much progress when politicians have said they want to see residents treated fairly in their dealings with police for more than 40 years.
A public inquiry by a judge has found a forensic pathologist in the Ontario coroner’s office, Dr. Charles Smith, volunteered inaccurate testimony over two decades, supposedly in his enthusiasm to combat child abuse, that led to at least 12 people being jailed, others wrongly accused and children removed from their parents, devastating many lives.
Senior officials in the coroner’s office, part of the ministry of community safety and correctional services, were found to have failed to supervise the doctor, defended him and in the end tried to protect their office’s reputation instead of the public and made community safety a low priority.
When a huge explosion destroyed a privately-owned propane storage depot in Toronto and damaged more than 500 homes at a time workers were transferring fuel illegally between trucks, the province was discovered to have left a little-known body run by the fuel industry, the Technical Standards and Safety Authority, to regulate and inspect the depots. The province is now considering taking over regulating, but there is not thorough confidence these days in government being a strict supervisor.
The Ombudsman, who has looked behind more closed doors and exposed more skeletons than anyone, has examined the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, responsible for providing financial help to victims of violent crime.
The Ombudsman found the board commonly treats applicants with suspicion and indifference and goes out of its way to use technicalities to avoid compensating them, so they wait an average three years for rulings.
He called the board a “colossal failure” and blamed successive governments of all parties that have allotted it unrealistic funds, although they express fervently in the legislature their determination to help victims of crime.
The Ontario auditor general, who looks mainly at whether the province gets value for money, studied children’s aid societies and found it pays for some of their officials to drive expensive, top-of-the-line SUVs and alleviate their stress with $2,000-a-year gym memberships, although their organizations lack funds to provide children’s programs.
The auditor general also cast his eye over whether the province’s efforts to prevent and control infections, including the rapidly spreading C. difficile, in hospitals are effective and found many healthcare workers, particularly doctors, contribute by failing to wash their hands between seeing patients.
Virtually whenever a public institution has been subjected to searching scrutiny, it has been found to have serious failings.
This suggests most and perhaps all government programs fail to do their jobs as effectively as they should, let down those they are supposed to serve and therefore waste huge amounts of taxpayers’ money.
Many public institutions are not subject to such scrutiny. The Ombudsman, the most aggressive investigator, has no mandate to look at complaints about school boards, universities, municipalities except on the narrow issue of closed meetings, police generally, as distinct from the Special Investigations Unit, and hospitals.
Marin has asked the province for authority to investigate complaints about hospitals and the opposition Progressive Conservatives and New Democrats support him, but Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty has refused, saying this is unnecessary.
The premier needs to show there are branches of government that work properly, but he is more afraid of finding more skeletons.
Eric Dowd is a veteran member of the Queen’s Park press gallery.
