Ontario auditor and ombudsman battling over accountability bill

Changes to law extend Marin’s reach, but not that of auditor general Lysyk

Ontario’s ombudsman and its auditor general are fighting, publicly and rudely, over a new law that gives the ombudsman more power to root out problems in governments across the province.

At issue is a bill that will have ombudsman André Marin treading on territory that auditors consider their turf: identifying programs that aren’t working the way they’re supposed to and recommending ways to fix them. The planned changes to the law extend Marin’s reach — but not Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s — into new institutions such as school boards, universities and cities.

An ombudsman’s basic job is to investigate complaints about bad government service; an auditor checks that money is being spent properly. In practice, they look a lot alike. Too much so, as it turns out.

“At the City of Ottawa, 80 to 90 per cent of what my staff do is performance auditing, valuefor-money auditing,” says Ken Hughes, the City of Ottawa’s auditor general and a member, unsurprisingly, of the auditor’s camp. He travelled to Toronto to tell a Queen’s Park committee studying the bill that he’s happy to have somebody look over his shoulder but that it should be Lysyk.

He’s careful not to disparage Marin personally or the function of an ombudsman in general, but he says each job has its place.

“There’s really not a very grey area at all,” Hughes says. He and Lysyk told the committee of MPPs as much, each advising against having an ombudsman do the work of an auditor.

The trouble is that Marin is best known for work that’s closest to what Hughes and Lysyk consider their bread and butter: He takes individual cases and compiles them into compelling accounts of public institutions gone rotten.

Investigating beatings of prisoners in provincial jails, for instance, Marin attacked a “code of silence” that protects guards from justice. (The one prosecution that emerged from the shocking Ottawa case he documented fell apart when guard witnesses changed their stories, helping prove his point.) He didn’t just propose ways to make sure individual complaints of brutality get taken seriously, he explained how to clean up a blighted culture.

Same thing with corrupt convenience-store clerks stealing lottery winnings and, more recently, with poor provincial oversight of daycares.

The daycare report, and one to come on hydro billing, illustrate the problem: Lysyk is working on reports on the same subjects, due next week.

Do we need both? As a reporter, I love getting two damning reports instead of just one. As a citizen, I wonder what happens if they recommend different solutions to the same problems. The more conflict and ambiguity, the more room for the bad people to hide.

We’ve actually had this prob- lem for a long time. It’s just taken Bill 8, and perhaps the unique person of André Marin, to bring it into the open. What’s unique about Marin, other than his dedication to do right, is his blunt force. He promptly deployed it against the auditors after they testified.

First he tweeted that Lysyk and Hughes had launched an “astoundingly inept” attack on the bill. He followed up with a letter to Lysyk, accusing her of blindsiding him, of misleading the committee (a serious charge) by taking something he’d said out of context, of advocating a “perilous and massive step backward in terms of accountability and transparency for the citizens of Ontario.”

If he can’t do systemic investigations, he wrote, it would “neuter” him.

Had she told him in advance what she was thinking, “I would have been able to educate you about the legislative history of the Ombudsman Act, how ombudsmen balance individual and systemic investigations, and the context behind the Bill 8 amendments as they relate to my Office,” he told her.

Since then, Marin’s praised a decision by the new mayor of scandal-ridden Brampton to call in Lysyk’s predecessor as the provincial auditor, Jim McCarter, to report on the true state of the city’s finances, and Marin himself to advise on ways to clean up the culture at city hall there. McCarter checks the numbers, Marin everything else.

Pissing matches between accountability officers whose findings are not really open to challenge are bad for Ontario and this one has gone beyond the text of a bill. Whatever the final law ends up saying, these people will need to find a way to get along.