CONTENTS
Wednesday 21 October 1992
Review of Office of the Ombudsman of Ontario
Donald C. Rowat
STANDING COMMITTEE ON THE OMBUDSMAN
*Chair / Président: Morrow, Mark (Wentworth East/-Est ND)
Vice-Chair / Vice-Présidente: Haeck, Christel (St Catharines-Brock ND)
*Akande, Zanana L. (St Andrew-St Patrick ND)
Drainville, Dennis (Victoria-Haliburton ND)
Duignan, Noel (Halton North/-Nord ND)
Henderson, D. James (Etobicoke-Humber L)
Johnson, Paul R. (Prince Edward-Lennox-South Hastings/Prince Edward-Lennox-Hastings-Sud ND)
*Miclash, Frank (Kenora L)
*Murdoch, Bill (Grey PC)
Perruzza, Anthony (Downsview ND)
*Ramsay, David (Timiskaming L)
Witmer, Elizabeth (Waterloo North/-Nord PC)
Substitutions / Membres remplaçants:
*Abel, Donald (Wentworth North/-Nord ND) for Mr Duignan
*Cooper, Mike (Kitchener-Wilmot ND) for Ms Haeck
*Harrington, Margaret H. (Niagara Falls ND) for Mr Drainville
*Mammoliti, George (Yorkview ND) for Mr Johnson
*In attendance / présents
Clerk / Greffier: Carrozza, Franco
Staff / Personnel: McNaught, Andrew, research officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1017 in room 151.
REVIEW OF OFFICE OF THE OMBUDSMAN
The Chair (Mr Mark Morrow): I'd like to call this meeting to order. I'm Mark Morrow, chairman of the standing committee on the Ombudsman. We're here this morning to continue our review of the Office of the Ombudsman.
DONALD C. ROWAT
The Chair: I would like to welcome Professor Donald Rowat, department of political science, Carleton University. Good morning and welcome, professor. You have ample time this morning to make your presentation. I would please ask that you leave some time at the end of your presentation so that members can ask questions and/or comments. I'm sure everybody has some comments that they would like to make. Feel comfortable and begin when you're ready. Although I have stated your name, would you please state your name for the record.
Dr Donald C. Rowat: I'm Donald Rowat from Carleton University. I want to start off by saying I consider it a great honour to be invited to appear before this august committee, which has been in operation now for something like 17 years.
I should start by saying that professors are programmed to speak for exactly 50 minutes, but I've been told by Franco Carrozza that I am to have approximately 20 minutes, but that may be extended because you have a little more time this morning. Anyway, I'll try to adhere to the famous old proverb by Confucius that he who speaketh by the yard and thinketh by the inch deserves to be kicketh by the foot. I'll try to keep my remarks brief so there will be time for discussion.
I'm going to speak mainly to the three tables that I've distributed that were on the top of your package, tables 1, 2 and 3. I see my logical role in making a presentation to this committee as giving you a kind of comparative overview, because I've done a comparative study of the ombudsman in a book called The Ombudsman Plan. My comments are going to be based mainly on these three tables, and then I'll end up with some comments on the relation of legislative committees to ombudsmen in the hope of promoting smoother relations between your committee and the Ombudsman's office.
The first table is the first one that I think has ever been compiled to show the total number of legislative plans in the world and their nature. I would call your attention to its source at the bottom of the page on table 1. It comes from the International Ombudsman Institute, which is based in Edmonton. It used to produce a very valuable survey of the legislative ombudsman plans, and the survey has since been abandoned so there are no more recent figures than these, unfortunately. I'm glad I took advantage of it, at that time, when I prepared this table, to make use of its survey.
If you look at the table, you'll note that most of the legislative ombudsman systems are in the developed countries. Many are regional and local -- regional, which of course includes states and provinces. Note especially the regional ones which are relevant to you, in Australia, Canada and the United States. They exist mainly in the federations, but more recently, Italy and Spain have had ombudsman institutions placed in force, and those under heading "C" approved but not yet in force.
That was at the time that this table was compiled. Since then a number of the regions in Italy have appointed ombudsmen, and also they've been spreading in Spain. They started in Spain in the most autonomous regions, and then the central government has since adopted an ombudsman plan in Spain. So it exists in quite a number, I would say a majority, of the developed democracies at the national level in Western Europe.
Another thing to note in the table is the lack of regional and local plans in the developing countries, except for India. I had the opportunity to go to India to study the state ombudsman plans there. Of course the thing that can't help but impress you is that it exists in some of the most populous states in India. They easily have the largest ombudsman constituencies in the world, because the population of those states is numbered in the millions and millions. It's not surprising that they do not operate with as much success as in the western democracies.
I think the obvious reason they don't exist to such an extent in the developed countries is that they are much more highly centralized. I did a study of the civil servants in the developed and developing countries and discovered that a very high proportion of the public servants in the developed democracies worked for regional or state or local governments. But this is not true in the developing countries, which are much more highly centralized and do not have federations or autonomous local governments.
The thing to draw your attention to is the totals at the bottom of the page. You'll notice there were 90 legislative ombudsman plans in 1983, of which 25 were national, 44 were regional and 21 were local. So it's interesting that a majority of the plans are state or local. By now, there may be 100 legislative plans in the world, because they keep being adopted in one country after another.
Before concluding my comments on that table, I want to draw your attention to a minor error that I discovered last night in looking over the table, and that is that Switzerland is stated here as having a plan at the national level, whereas that actually should be under "local." The city of Zurich and the canton of Zurich each have a plan, but not at the national level. That number got misplaced. The totals are correct; it's just a printing error. So much for table 1. You may have questions about that which you'd like to ask later.
Now let's move on to table 2. Here I compare the complaints per 100,000 to give you some idea of the comparative success of the ombudsman plans in the various developed democracies. I've only included the developed democracies because it's very difficult to get information on the total number of complaints. The source of this table is not indicated, nor the year, because that was in the text from which the table was taken. The year is 1980 for most of the figures given, and the source is the same, this survey of the International Ombudsman Institute.
I had forgotten that I sent Franco a copy of a chapter in an American book where I'd written about the ombudsman. These tables are contained in that paper, and, because they're so rare, they are also repeated in a more recent paper that has just been distributed to you that I just finished in October.
So this table, then, shows you complaints only. I tried to leave out -- most of the ombudsmen's annual reports give you the total number of inquiries and complaints, and then they'll give you a separate figure for complaints. But the trouble is that the definitions vary; the definitions are not the same. For example, the Ombudsman for Ontario only counts written complaints, and yet a number of complaints are received by telephone. They're not inquiries; they're actual complaints. The ombudsmen have different ways of counting these, so that may explain the somewhat lower figure for Ontario, because the others may have counted complaints received by telephone as well.
The interesting things to note about this table are that the figures, despite these variations in definitions, are remarkably similar. You'll note that the high ones are Israel and Hawaii, which have a very high proportion of complaints per 100,000 population, and the low ones are Iowa and France.
There's a special reason why France is so low. You see that it has only seven per 100,000 population. The reason is that complaints must go to a member of the Legislature before going to the ombudsman, as in the United Kingdom, and that has had an almost disastrous effect on the plans in those two countries. Because the complaints cannot go directly to the ombudsman, they handle a far fewer number, although the ombudsman in France began a device where an urgent complaint would come in directly to him and then he would get the agreement of a member of the Legislature to receive that complaint formally. So he managed to circumvent the restriction in that way.
I think a comparison with developing countries would probably show them at a very low level of complaints per 100,000 population. I discovered this in India, for instance, where they have these millions and millions of population, but many of the members of the population have never even heard of the Ombudsman, so it's not surprising that they have a low number of complaints per 100,000.
These tables are discussed further in the papers that Franco Carrozza has distributed to you, and you'll get to more commentary on them in those papers.
The one that was just distributed to you, that I completed most recently, is going to be published in French in the Revue française d'administration publique. What he's distributed is the English version of that paper. I've left a copy of the paper with Franco, and he's now having it photocopied and it will be distributed to you. The tables are blown up on the photocopy machine so that you can read them more easily in the versions that have been distributed to you.
Table 3 is a new one that I've just compiled for the benefit of your committee. I began realizing that you could make a very simple comparison of complaints per staff member, because all of the ombudsmen's reports give you a figure on the total number of complaints and also a figure of their total staff, so you can get a very elementary and very rough comparison of the number of complaints handled per staff member, which is a rough measure of efficiency. So it's relatively easy to do.
I simply took the annual reports I had that were conveniently available, and that's why they're for different years, because some of them are slower than others at sending out their reports. I think it gives you a useful comparison, even though you have to keep in mind that the definitions differ somewhat from one plan to another. I think counting only complaints is less reliable because of the differences in definition, whereas if you take the total figure of complaints and inquiries -- most ombudsmen wish to demonstrate that their office is useful, and therefore they're very good at counting all the complaints and inquiries and giving you a total figure. I think it's more useful to compare those, although I've given you figures for both.
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The first heading is "Complaints and Inquiries" and the second one is "Complaints Only." If you look down the column for 1990, which is the easiest one to compare, you'll note that Ontario's figure is the lowest, so each staff member handles fewer complaints and inquiries or fewer complaints than the other countries it is compared with. I compared it mainly with Quebec and British Columbia, as representative Canadian provinces, and New Zealand and New South Wales in Australia, because I had travelled to Australia and had collected information recently on those countries. That's the basis for picking the countries.
I've said elsewhere in papers I've given that one of the remarkable things about this kind of comparison is that the federal Ombudsman in Australia handles twice as many complaints with half the staff. That's a bit of an exaggeration, I discovered. I think I must have been using old figures for Ontario. Even so, you'll find that it's not far off the mark if you take complaints only. I couldn't get a figure for complaints of all kinds for Ontario for 1989-90. I didn't have the most recent report for 1991-92, so the figure of 67 for 1991 seems to be the one to focus on.
If you look down that column, then, you'll find that Ontario has fewer than Quebec, British Columbia and especially Australia on all counts. If you look at New South Wales and New Zealand, however, for 1989-90, which is the year I have figures for, you'll find that they don't come off very well, and they're down there with Ontario. Of course, this has to be taken as a very rough measure of efficiency because of the differences in definition that I've pointed out.
When I was in Australia, of course I was mystified about how the federal Ombudsman in Australia managed to handle so many complaints and inquiries with such a small staff. The answer that I seemed to come up with was his use of the telephone. Most ombudsmen will allow complaints to come in by telephone, but the difference in the federal scheme in Australia is that the Ombudsman uses the telephone to settle complaints. In other words, instead of a high degree of documentation in written complaints, he uses the telephone to settle complaints. Instead of sending people over to a department to get the documentation or having it sent to him, he uses the telephone wherever possible. He was forced into that because of a very skinny budget. He has said on a number of occasions that he had a starvation budget and had to invent efficient ways of handling these complaints.
Just to confirm my impression, I wrote to the former Ombudsman, Dennis Pearce, and this is the letter that's attached as the final two pages in this documentation.
Mr Pearce was kind enough to write back and confirm that he thought I was right, that the use of the telephone was probably the main secret of his success, but he has always argued that he's been underbudgeted. He ends his letter by saying, "Please don't take the federal scheme in Australia as a model, because we had been understaffed and underbudgeted for years." I'll leave you to read his letter without taking any more time with it.
I guess my conclusion about this table is that it would be very interesting to compare all the provinces in Canada with Ontario, or Ontario since 1975. It would be quite possible to pull out these figures over a period of time, which I didn't have time to do. A researcher might be able to do this for you.
Now I come to the hard part of my presentation, and that is the committee-Ombudsman relations. I guess the first comment I would make is that the correct balance between supervision of the Ombudsman's office and interference is a very hard balance to strike.
Your committee, I think, is very unusual among Ombudsman plans in the world simply by its existence. There are very few Ombudsman plans that have a legislative committee that supervises the Office of the Ombudsman. It's my impression, and the impression of all the scholars who have written about it, that it's a very valuable committee and has done some tremendously good work.
As a former Chairman of this committee, Mr Runciman, has pointed out in an article he did in Parliamentary Affairs, a link between the Legislature and the Ombudsman through a committee of this kind is very badly needed, because you can't expect the Legislature as a whole to supervise an office of this kind; it has to be done through a committee.
I would say the unique feature of this committee, even among the countries that do have legislative committees, is its review of recommendation-denied cases. This, I think, is unique and extremely valuable work that the committee has done, and the reason is that the dominance of the cabinet in the parliamentary system means that the government and its agencies can easily refuse the Ombudsman's decisions. You have to keep in mind that they're only recommendations and that the Ombudsman has no power to enforce the decisions, but the committee can give them political backing and this is what this committee has been doing. This is badly needed in the British parliamentary system because of the dominance of the cabinet over the Legislature when it has a majority.
This was revealed very clearly in my study of the Ombudsman in India, because there you found that the ignoring of the Ombudsman and his activities by the Legislature was so great, particularly at the insistence of the government, that even the annual reports of the Ombudsman were not tabled in the Legislature for several years after he had issued his report. Of course, the government's interest was that it didn't want criticisms and comments until long after the events had taken place. This was an easy way for them not to be subjected to the public criticisms of the Ombudsman.
I think the remarkable thing about the work of this committee is the way in which the departments and agencies cave in before they're to appear before this committee. You find that most of the cases of this kind are settled even before the department or agency appears before the committee, simply because they don't want to go through the ignominy, I guess you could say, of having to justify or oppose the Ombudsman's recommendation publicly.
The other unusual feature of the committee is the regulations that the committee has formulated. I say it's unusual but not unique because it's not unprecedented. It exists in several other Ombudsman plans, especially the original ones in Scandinavia and Sweden and Finland, where a committee of the Legislature has formulated guidelines or regulations for the activities of the Ombudsman's office. Formulating guidelines for the approval of the Legislature by a committee seems to me a legitimate extension of the legislation to ensure accountability.
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I think it's more difficult to strike a proper balance on budgetary control, especially during this present time of financial constraint. The government's budgetary role is to measure the value of every government service against every other, including the Office of the Ombudsman, so I believe that at least the Ombudsman's estimates should be considered along with the other legislative offices such as the auditor, the electoral commissioner and so on.
In conclusion, I would say that there will always be inevitable tension between the twin desirable objectives of independence of the Ombudsman's office and its accountability to the Legislature. It's not surprising that over the years there have been confrontations and a certain amount of tension between the committee and the Ombudsman's office. But keep in mind that the committee and the Ombudsman have coexisted successfully for 17 years and have done a tremendous amount of useful work, so I predict that the present difficulties will be overcome and an even more desirable balance will be struck between independence and accountability in the future.
I would conclude that we shouldn't be pessimistic about the present confrontation. We shouldn't be like Allan Lamport, the former mayor of Toronto. You remember he was famous for his malapropisms. At one point Lamport said, "If this thing catches fire, it will snowball right across the country." So I hope it doesn't catch fire.
I've seen the Ombudsman's report to the Speaker in August but I haven't seen the committee's report of last May -- I don't know if Franco perhaps forgot to send me one -- so I don't feel qualified to go into further detail on the two sets of recommendations, but I'll be glad to answer your questions to the best of my ability.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Professor Rowat, for that fine presentation. Questions and/or comments.
Mr Donald Abel (Wentworth North): Thank you, Mr Rowat, for your presentation. A couple of things came to mind. I was going through some of the articles you had presented to us. I look forward to reading them; I think I'll get a lot out of them. First of all, there's Why Democracies Need a Legislative Ombudsman, and one that caught my eye was Why an Ombudsman to Supervise the Courts? I guess that brings us to the matter of accountability, for obvious reasons, and I'm sure I'll find out when I read the article why you feel the Ombudsman should supervise the courts. But who do you think the Ombudsman should be accountable to?
Dr Rowat: I would say probably the Legislature. As Mr Runciman has pointed out, it's extremely difficult to make any office accountable to the whole Legislature, and that's why I think a committee of this kind has to exist to represent the Legislature.
Mr Abel: So it's your opinion that the Ombudsman should certainly be, I guess as an officer of the Legislature, accountable to the Legislative Assembly, by way of a committee such as this.
Dr Rowat: Yes indeed. As I pointed out, it's a question of striking a balance between the desirable degree of independence and the desirable degree of supervision and accountability.
Mr Abel: There's one other thing; this is for my own curiosity. During your deputation you had said that Ontario registers only written complaints and deals with telephone complaints in a different manner. Could you explain how they deal with the telephone complaints, and are those complaints factored into the overall total?
Dr Rowat: Yes. I think what they do is transform a telephone complaint into a written complaint. In other words, if it seems like a legitimate one that they may wish to investigate, they will ask the complainant to submit it in written form or they may even help the complainant who finds difficulty in writing a complaint formulate it in a desirable written form.
I don't think there's double accounting, though. I was worried about that. I thought maybe they receive a complaint by phone and record that as a complaint and then when it's transformed into a written complaint, they count it as another one. I don't think they do that. They will eliminate the original count so it doesn't inflate the total.
Mr Abel: Thank you, Mr Rowat. Again, I look forward to reading your articles.
Ms Margaret H. Harrington (Niagara Falls): I found your comments very interesting. It's important for us to set our committee and our way of working in Ontario against the whole backdrop of how it's done in other places, so I think it's very useful.
One statement you made with regard to Ontario is that the review of the recommendation-denied by this committee then gives the Ombudsman political backing. You felt that was important and certainly a good thing. Would you say therefore that in Ontario the system works better than in most other places?
Dr Rowat: Yes, as far as implementing the difficult cases is concerned, it works better. I would stress again that this committee's work in that respect is unique, and for that reason it's difficult to compare this committee with other committees, even where they do exist. I think Graham White pointed that out in his article, that this committee is not like any other, so it doesn't do much good to compare it with the British committee or the one in Alberta or wherever they exist because they don't do this kind of work, which is, I think, a really interesting development of this committee.
Ms Harrington: I have another question. On your table 3 of the comparisons, you discussed why Australia by the use of the telephone was able to handle so much more, but I wanted to compare Ontario with BC. In many ways, Ontario and BC are comparable, I would imagine, in the type of citizens and the type of complaints and how the system operates. The comparison numbers are 67 in Ontario in 1990 and 207 in BC. Is there a reason for that difference that you can find?
Dr Rowat: I don't know what the reason is. I've just compiled this table; of course, when you do a statistical comparison of this kind, it often raises interesting questions that you would never think of before. That is one interesting one. I was puzzled by this too: Why does British Columbia manage to handle so many complaints with a much smaller staff?
Ms Harrington: You've given us a reason for Australia, so there must be some kind of reason for BC.
Dr Rowat: Yes. It would be interesting to find out, but I don't know the answer.
Ms Harrington: I think you'll have to take a trip out there.
Dr Rowat: Maybe.
Mr David Ramsay (Timiskaming): Good morning, professor. Thank you very much for your presentation. When you do these comparative statistics, to me, it would be interesting to do it on a dollar-per-complaint basis too, just to see overall efficiencies there. As you know, we have a fairly large budget for Ontario, about $9.4 million, so it's a very big operation. It would be interesting, another way of comparing, I guess.
Dr Rowat: Yes, that would be interesting. All the Ombudsman reports give the total budget, so it would be quite possible to make this kind of comparison.
Mr Ramsay: Yes, very much so. Near the close of your remarks, you stated that you felt it would be appropriate for the Legislature to consider the budget of the Office of the Ombudsman. I wonder if you have any specific recommendations for us in this regard: We are a Legislative Assembly that has an estimates committee to handle estimates of all government ministries, and in this particular case we have a specialized committee, this committee, to deal with issues of the Ombudsman. Do you think it would be appropriate that the Ombudsman, in order to focus on whom she report to, deal with budgetary estimates in this committee, or do you think it should be just like any other ministry or agency and go to the estimates committee? I was just wondering if you had any opinion on that.
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Dr Rowat: I have a very definite opinion on that. It seems to me that most of the provinces provide that the agencies of the Legislature are reviewed by a special committee. I think this review should be done apart from the general estimates of the government, because it's too much under the domination of the government to have the estimates considered as part of the ordinary estimates. On the other hand, I would not recommend having them considered solely by this committee, because it seems to me that you need to compare the expenditures of one office against another. At least one ought to compare the work of the Ombudsman against the other legislative offices, such as the auditor and the chief electoral officer and so on. In other words, the Legislature usually has its own review of the legislative budget, and I think that's the place where it ought to be considered.
Mr Ramsay: That's a very good point. You're correct, and I agree with you about a comparative type of study. For Ontario we have our Board of Internal Economy that basically approves expenditures of the Legislature and servants of the Legislature.
The problem with that is that it's dominated by members of the executive -- three cabinet ministers sit on that -- so many of us in the assembly feel that is the wrong place for her budget to be approved. But maybe that's the balance: As she is a servant of the Legislature, the final approval should go through the Board of Internal Economy, but maybe the standing committee on the Ombudsman would be the appropriate body to actually go through the estimates process and do the detailed discussion and flush out all the expenditures and have that discussion. Maybe this is the place, but in a way there is that balance, with the Board of Internal Economy that oversees all budgets of agencies --
Dr Rowat: Yes, but I wouldn't see any more reason for doing that than for the other officers of the Legislature or the other expenditures of the Legislature. There's no special case for having the Ombudsman's estimates considered separately from, say, the auditor or the chief electoral officer, or the other officers of the Legislature, for that matter.
The Chair: Further questions or comments?
Mr George Mammoliti (Yorkview): Very interesting stuff. I'm certainly going to read what you've given us and go back into Hansard as well, because I missed the first part of your submission.
I want to go back to Australia, in terms of the phone calls and the way they do things. I want to talk about public satisfaction, I guess, and the reason behind the review and why a lot of MPPs are concerned in terms of the number of complaints that are coming out of our system. Frankly, I think there is a problem of some sort, and whether we're having a problem with the amount of money we're spending with our system and with the system itself.
I guess my question is, during your stay in Australia, did you find that the public was satisfied with that type of system, or were there a number of complaints in terms of efficiency and correspondence and in terms of perhaps misconception over the phone and that sort of thing?
Dr Rowat: You're wondering whether the public is satisfied with the activities of the federal Ombudsman?
Mr Mammoliti: Right.
Dr Rowat: I didn't have a chance to get a very good impression of that, but I certainly didn't hear any great complaints. My general impression is that the public in Australia is quite satisfied with the activities of the Ombudsman. There doesn't seem to be any letdown in the efficiency with which the complaints are handled as a result of the greater use of the telephone.
One thing you have to keep in mind too is that the Ombudsman tends to serve the disaffected and the uneducated more than the rest of the population, and they're the ones who find it difficult to make a written complaint. They would far rather make use of the telephone. That's not true in the developing countries, of course, because in India they don't have telephones so they can't make complaints by telephone. But we're quite used to doing this, and most people would rather pick up a phone than write a letter.
Mr Mammoliti: So there's actually some advantage to using the phone and bringing that personal touch --
Dr Rowat: That's right.
Mr Mammoliti: As Bell Canada would say, that personal feeling, that personal touch to somebody. A lot of the complaints coming out are just that, that they're not able to see or speak to anybody, that it's strictly paperwork, that they don't feel attended to in a proper way. Would you agree that the telephone may be a cheaper and wiser way of doing business in terms of accommodating the public and making it feel comfortable?
Dr Rowat: Yes, it looks to me as if it would, but there's one important point I forgot to mention. I think Graham White makes this point in his writings. I think one of the reasons for the more elaborate procedures used by the office in Ontario is the very existence of this committee. In other words, the Ontario Ombudsman wants to make sure that everything is well documented, because these cases are likely to appear before this committee and the Ombudsman is going to have to justify them against the department's or agency's point of view. That may be one of the explanations of the somewhat higher cost you might find in the Office of the Ombudsman of Ontario. It's more difficult to shift to a less formal procedure, I think.
Mr Mammoliti: Can I have just one more question? You may want to answer, you may not. You've seen the experience of Australia, you've had a grasp of our system here. I realize that the individual in Australia who has written to us has said not to use them as an example because of their budget, but at the same time, if they haven't received that many complaints, obviously they're satisfied with that type of approach. Would it be a significant saving if we were to look at using the telephone as a means of --
Dr Rowat: I think so, but one point to keep in mind is that there is no easy way for one to get an impression of how efficient the office is in Australia. There's no comparable committee to this one, so nobody really is looking at how satisfied the public is with the Ombudsman's activities. It's extremely difficult to measure. I mean, how does one find out whether the public is satisfied with the Ombudsman's activities, other than running some kind of survey? Who would conduct it? It's difficult to get an impression.
Mr Mammoliti: Thank you, sir.
Mr Bill Murdoch (Grey): Thank you for coming, professor. We certainly appreciate your views. As you know, this committee decided to have a review of the Ombudsman and of the whole situation, and she has refused to sit here, as in our review, to talk to us or to answer questions, when it's specifically with the review. I just wondered what your thoughts may be on that, or your thoughts on the whole review. Do you think it's a good idea or not? We haven't had one for 17 years.
Dr Rowat: It's not unusual for a legislative committee to conduct periodic reviews, and I think it's becoming more frequent. For instance, the legislation on freedom of information: It's quite common here and in other jurisdictions for the legislation to provide for a five-year review or whatever. I think that's becoming more common, and it seems to me quite a legitimate activity for a legislative committee to conduct such a review periodically, because you can't do a thorough review every year. So it needs to be done, I think.
Mr Murdoch: That's really all I had.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Murdoch. Mr Cooper, I understand you have a question.
Mr Mike Cooper (Kitchener-Wilmot): Mr Rowat, good morning. You have the tables here that give a lot of numbers, but one of the factors is how familiar the public is with the Ombudsman offices. That would obviously make a difference. From the systems you've studied, are most of them passive or are they very proactive, going out to the public, advertising that they're there? That would make a difference in the numbers. If it's a very proactive office, then the public would know it's there and obviously they'd get more calls. Do you have any comparison between the different offices?
Dr Rowat: I don't have a comparison, but I have an impression. I've often said that it seems to me that one of the chief problems of Ombudsman offices everywhere is that they are afraid of advertising too much for fear they'll be overwhelmed with complaints and be unable to handle them, and then they'll be accused of the same delay they're accusing the departments and agencies of. If they're not assured of a budget that can handle the increase in complaints, they are hesitant about being too proactive in advertising their services.
Many jurisdictions have done surveys of the public about how much knowledge it has of the Ombudsman. One was conducted recently by the Ombudsman's office here. It's quite common to find that only half the people in the jurisdiction have ever heard of the Ombudsman. There's clearly a need out there for people to be made much more aware of the availability and the services of the Ombudsman, everywhere. It's a real problem.
Mr Cooper: But from a lot of these tables, it would depend on how long the Ombudsman's office has been out there for public familiarity, things like that.
Dr Rowat: I think so, and how well it's known.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Cooper. Seeing no further questions and/or comments, Professor Rowat, I would like to thank you for taking time out of what I know is your busy schedule to help us in this review.
This committee now stands adjourned until 10 am, October 28.
The committee adjourned at 1102.