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Do everything in your power to make sure you aren’t at the government’s mercy, is the message shooting through the Ontario ombudsman’s latest report on Wednesday.
Paul Dubé doesn’t make the same racket as his predecessor André Marin did but when he tells us what he’s been up to, the accounts are no less damning.
Two complaints from people on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), which helps people who aren’t capable of working, stand out. One man needs incontinence supplies, which the government pays for, but the supplier stopped bringing them because the government wasn’t paying the bills.
“He was unable to reach ODSP staff to address the issue, but when our staff inquired, we were told renovations at the local ODSP office caused delays in processing invoices and payments,” Dubé’s report says.
We’re in a bit of a shambles over here. Sorry you’re sitting in your own piss while we get our files straight.
Another man had his rent payment cut off without notice and when he wrote to find out why, nobody answered.
“Our staff checked with ODSP staff and found the case worker was on a leave of absence — and her colleagues were only checking her phone messages, not emails,” the ombudsman reports.
Some of these things happened in Ottawa, some in Kenora, some in Welland. The stories are all diligently scrubbed of details.
A woman with a broken collarbone was sent to jail and they took away her sling when she got there because she might use it as a weapon. She complained, the ombudsman’s people made a call, and the health workers at the jail said if a doctor prescribes it, it’s no problem — “many inmates in general population are permitted to have assistive devices.” There was no reason for her to be in pain.
Speaking of inmates, they’re entitled to parole hearings before they’re eligible for release, so that if they qualify they can leave jail as soon as possible. Ontario often breaks the law on this, Dubé found, with “parole hearings being scheduled past an inmate’s parole eligibility date (contrary to legislation) or delayed due to lack of hearing space, and inmates being denied parole due to missing or incomplete documentation.”
One woman had her parole hearing rescheduled twice “because of missing documentation due to a broken fax machine.” She spent two extra months behind bars — two months of her life, two months of our money — because someone didn’t fix the fax. The fax.
The Family Responsibility Office, which handles things like child-support payments so ex-spouses don’t have to go at each other personally, took almost $12,000 from a guy’s wages for five years of support he did not owe. And it let $35,000 in payments another guy did owe slide for 14 years, despite his ex’s pleas for help.
Then there’s ordinary stupidity that just makes people’s lives worse. Late birth and marriage certificates, drivers’ licences that don’t come in time to replace expiring ones, health coverage inexplicably cancelled.
A ServiceOntario worker typed in the wrong licence-plate number for a woman’s car and transferred legal ownership to some other random person. They didn’t get the physical vehicle or anything, but imagine explaining to a police officer why someone else’s name is on your car’s registration. Someone you don’t know. And it took the ombudsman’s intervention to fix it.
Ontario’s about to get a new government headed by Doug Ford, a service-oriented retail politician who at his core doesn’t trust the government. Dubé sees an opportunity, and also a hazard.
“I heard all parties in the election campaign promoting transparency, accountability and fairness and that’s what we’re here to provide,” Dubé said.
But Ford has also promised to cut spending dramatically. Government will improve, he’s said, though very often there are unintended consequences. Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives were efficiency-minded and it’ll be a long time before veterans forget the service offices they closed, the way military spouse Jenny Migneault chased minister Julian Fantino to confront him about her husband’s untreated injury. It saved money but didn’t make the world better.
“Sometimes when there are cuts, services are affected. That’s just a logical fact. So we’ll see. We’ll see,” Dubé said.
Dubé’s office got about 21,000 complaints about government failures last year, a typical number. They could settle almost two-thirds of them with just a phone call or two, letting bureaucrats know that somebody was paying attention.
“What we often discover is that the most entrenched issues are ones that public sector bodies are aware of and would like to fix,” Dubé said. There are too few people doing too much work using outdated systems — rules that don’t answer reality and equipment that isn’t up to the job.
It’s not that people who work in the government are any worse than anybody else. It’s that when balls hit the ground, the consequences are worse, so they need to be better.
And sometimes, of course, people are lazy and they screw up, and innocent citizens suffer.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Paul Dubé doesn’t make the same racket as his predecessor André Marin did but when he tells us what he’s been up to, the accounts are no less damning.
Two complaints from people on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), which helps people who aren’t capable of working, stand out. One man needs incontinence supplies, which the government pays for, but the supplier stopped bringing them because the government wasn’t paying the bills.
“He was unable to reach ODSP staff to address the issue, but when our staff inquired, we were told renovations at the local ODSP office caused delays in processing invoices and payments,” Dubé’s report says.
We’re in a bit of a shambles over here. Sorry you’re sitting in your own piss while we get our files straight.
Another man had his rent payment cut off without notice and when he wrote to find out why, nobody answered.
“Our staff checked with ODSP staff and found the case worker was on a leave of absence — and her colleagues were only checking her phone messages, not emails,” the ombudsman reports.
Some of these things happened in Ottawa, some in Kenora, some in Welland. The stories are all diligently scrubbed of details.
A woman with a broken collarbone was sent to jail and they took away her sling when she got there because she might use it as a weapon. She complained, the ombudsman’s people made a call, and the health workers at the jail said if a doctor prescribes it, it’s no problem — “many inmates in general population are permitted to have assistive devices.” There was no reason for her to be in pain.
Speaking of inmates, they’re entitled to parole hearings before they’re eligible for release, so that if they qualify they can leave jail as soon as possible. Ontario often breaks the law on this, Dubé found, with “parole hearings being scheduled past an inmate’s parole eligibility date (contrary to legislation) or delayed due to lack of hearing space, and inmates being denied parole due to missing or incomplete documentation.”
One woman had her parole hearing rescheduled twice “because of missing documentation due to a broken fax machine.” She spent two extra months behind bars — two months of her life, two months of our money — because someone didn’t fix the fax. The fax.
The Family Responsibility Office, which handles things like child-support payments so ex-spouses don’t have to go at each other personally, took almost $12,000 from a guy’s wages for five years of support he did not owe. And it let $35,000 in payments another guy did owe slide for 14 years, despite his ex’s pleas for help.
Then there’s ordinary stupidity that just makes people’s lives worse. Late birth and marriage certificates, drivers’ licences that don’t come in time to replace expiring ones, health coverage inexplicably cancelled.
A ServiceOntario worker typed in the wrong licence-plate number for a woman’s car and transferred legal ownership to some other random person. They didn’t get the physical vehicle or anything, but imagine explaining to a police officer why someone else’s name is on your car’s registration. Someone you don’t know. And it took the ombudsman’s intervention to fix it.
Ontario’s about to get a new government headed by Doug Ford, a service-oriented retail politician who at his core doesn’t trust the government. Dubé sees an opportunity, and also a hazard.
“I heard all parties in the election campaign promoting transparency, accountability and fairness and that’s what we’re here to provide,” Dubé said.
But Ford has also promised to cut spending dramatically. Government will improve, he’s said, though very often there are unintended consequences. Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives were efficiency-minded and it’ll be a long time before veterans forget the service offices they closed, the way military spouse Jenny Migneault chased minister Julian Fantino to confront him about her husband’s untreated injury. It saved money but didn’t make the world better.
“Sometimes when there are cuts, services are affected. That’s just a logical fact. So we’ll see. We’ll see,” Dubé said.
Dubé’s office got about 21,000 complaints about government failures last year, a typical number. They could settle almost two-thirds of them with just a phone call or two, letting bureaucrats know that somebody was paying attention.
“What we often discover is that the most entrenched issues are ones that public sector bodies are aware of and would like to fix,” Dubé said. There are too few people doing too much work using outdated systems — rules that don’t answer reality and equipment that isn’t up to the job.
It’s not that people who work in the government are any worse than anybody else. It’s that when balls hit the ground, the consequences are worse, so they need to be better.
And sometimes, of course, people are lazy and they screw up, and innocent citizens suffer.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
