Ontario’s Ombudsman to McGuinty: Bad, Bad Government
It’s not very often that a government official will hand an official Opposition a cache of ammunition for use in an election campaign. Ontario’s ombudsman, André Marin, did that with his annual report, released yesterday. The full text is available here at his website, in PDF format.
I’d like to quote a passage from Mr. Marin’s opening remarks, which are also available in PDF format:
On the one hand, the actions of a Ministry, agency, board or commission are decried as shabby or incompetent. On the other, the reaction from the organization is to sideline the issue and proclaim itself “world class,” or an “international leader”– as if erecting a sign saying “I’m the best and the greatest” will assuage those who have suffered from neglect and maladministration. The bureaucracy’s credibility is dying a slow death by an affliction of “hyperbolitis” that is creating legions of disillusioned citizens who see through what is essentially a disingenuous smokescreen. It has not escaped the people of Ontario that the strongest leadership shown by many key government bureaucracies has been in making puffed-up promises.
The sarcasm in the above passage is readily apparent. One suspects that either Ontario’s senior officials have “house-trained” their political masters too effectively to cover their lack of action, or else they themselves have been overexposed to provincial Liberal rhetoric for far too long.
As examples of this Potemkin-village puffery, Mr. Marin cites the example of the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation. Let me quote from the report itself:
When we investigated the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) last year, I was struck by the irony of MPAC’s vision for itself as “the global leader in property assessment.” What we found was that MPAC was in fact a global leader in puffery. It failed to provide sufficient and timely assessment information to property owners, could not ensure that its assessment decisions were accurate, fair or transparent, and placed the onus on ordinary citizens to challenge its conclusions.
Unfortunately in our investigations over the past fiscal year, we have encountered many more cases of idle boasts made by government departments and agencies that are all too reminiscent of MPAC’s slick but hollow self-marketing.
There’s no room to list all the examples here; I suggest that you read the report directly. But there’s no way for Premier McGuinty to escape the conclusion many of his critics will draw: that even though some of these examples pre-dated his ascension, they all festered into examples of mismanagement during his watch. It’s going to be a lot harder for the provincial Liberals to claim good stewardship of government, in light of this report.
