When my office opened in April, I really didn’t know what to expect. Would our office be flooded with requests? Would the four complaints staff be swamped? How would we manage?
One of the first things we did was get our house in order. We set up systems, created and published service standards, and established intake procedures. Without any advertising or public awareness efforts we took in complaints (upwards of 450 in the first four months) and processed them. We got to know the public service, city staff and the public issues.
We heard from friends and neighbours that their friends and neighbours didn’t really know we existed, or what we did.
So after managing for the first six months, we put in place the next phase of our YEAR 1 plan – reach out directly to the public.
In addition to meetings and speeches I’ve given over the last few months (see our website), we set up some targeted community outreach.
We also relied on reporters to inform the public, so that we didn’t eat up a lot of costs in advertising.
So far we’ve met with three communities representing wards in North York, Scarborough and downtown Toronto, with another meeting on December 3 in Etobicoke.
This is just the beginning and over the next few years we will reach residents in all the wards of the city.
The upshot is that our complaint numbers have gone up. We’ve doubled and in some cases tripled the files our staff are working on. And we’re already facing a potential backlog.
Now you might ask: well why did you expand your work beyond what you can possibly manage?
And that’s a good question. Here’s the answer.
The City of Toronto Act mandated the City to appoint an ombudsman and the City in turn created further legislation to guide the Ombudsman.
It is not good enough to rely on people’s ability to access English language print media, their elected representatives, or a computer to find their way to the Ombudsman’s office. Those who are easily able to do so are likely to be savvy in research methods, may have more time on their hands or are just well positioned socio-economically to work their way successfully through the system. From experience, those most likely to be in need of this office may be the least likely to know about our services and are often not in a position to easily find out.
Our outreach efforts are about ensuring equitable fairness, a topic addressed on the previous page.
I have an obligation to let all sectors of Toronto’s communities know about the existence of our services. Residents may never use our services, but like an insurance policy, it is worth investing in the knowledge of our existence and should things go wrong that you can’t fix with the City, we may be able to help.
Fiona Crean, Ombudsman
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