Thank you everyone for joining us this evening. This evening represents the culmination of 50 years of working to protect the rights of all Ontarians. Since 1975, this office has handled more than 1 million individual complaints, conducted hundreds of investigations, and issued well over 1,300 recommendations.
Remarks for Ombudsman Ontario 50th Anniversary Reception
Paul Dubé
October 23, 2025
Thank you everyone for joining us this evening.
Before we get started, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the traditional Indigenous territories we are privileged to live and work on – the traditional territories of more than 130 First Nations, each with distinct cultures, languages, and histories.
These lands are also home to longstanding political confederacies, such as the Three Fires Confederacy and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, whose treaties and relationships shape the dynamic history of this province.
We recognize the more than 40 treaties in Ontario, including but not limited to Treaty 3, Treaty 9, the Robinson Superior and Huron Treaties, and the Williams Treaties, which continue to carry legal and moral responsibilities.
We acknowledge that Indigenous Peoples who have stewarded these lands for millennia have been subjected to dispossession and colonial injustices, and we remain committed to supporting efforts to address both historic and ongoing harms.
We are grateful for the opportunity to work on this part of Turtle Island.
I am honoured to introduce Steve Teekens, a member of Nippising First Nation, a traditional drummer, singer and grass dancer.
Steve is the Executive Director of Na-Me-Res, where he has worked since 2008. He has been working with the marginalized and homeless sector in Toronto since 1995.
Steve teaches drumming and singing to men and youth at various organizations in and outside of Toronto, and has drummed for audiences of all sizes around the world.
We are grateful to have him with us this evening to open our event and share his spirit of community, education and connection.
I would now like to present Steve with a gift of tobacco.
Steve, I am offering you this tobacco to open our event this evening.
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Thank you, Steve, for that moving opening, and for sharing with us.
I know we will take the energy you’ve shared into our daily lives and work.
Friends, for our team here at Ombudsman Ontario, this evening represents the culmination of 50 years of working to protect the rights of all Ontarians.
Since 1975, this office has handled more than 1 million individual complaints, conducted hundreds of investigations, and issued well over 1,300 recommendations.
We’ve helped – and sometimes prodded - public bodies to improve their services, reduce barriers and make changes that have benefited millions of people.
All of you in this room have contributed to that work.
Tonight, we come together to recognize all that has been accomplished, as well as all of the opportunities that lie ahead.
In my time as Ombudsman, it has been an honour to work with you and create a community of organizations, agencies and individuals willing to cooperate on our impartial, evidence-based assessments of issues, and recommendations aimed at improving systems, increasing access to justice, and improving services that affect people’s everyday lives.
When we look back at the foundation that was laid for us in 1975, it’s amazing how much – and yet how little – has changed. From the day the first Ombudsman – Arthur Maloney – was nominated, calls started pouring in.
The demand for the Ombudsman’s services was always there – and this past year, we recorded our highest case volume in more than 30 years.
The first investigation Arthur Maloney announced was into inhumane conditions at Ontario’s overcrowded jails. That’s a topic extremely familiar to our investigators today.
From the start, this Office was committed to serving Ontarians in English and French – and a multitude of other languages.
It reached out to Indigenous peoples across the province.
It focused on issues affecting vulnerable youth in care and in custody – all things we continue to do today.
Within the first year, Ombudsman Maloney also noticed he was receiving hundreds of complaints about municipalities, school boards and children’s aid societies, and he called on the province to expand his mandate to include them.
It would take more than 40 years, but the province eventually did so – right around the time of my first term. Today, our jurisdiction includes all of those bodies and more, allowing us to help more Ontarians than ever before.
It has been my great honour to build upon the legacy that he and my other tenacious and devoted predecessors set.
Over the years, Ombudsman Ontario garnered international admiration, not only for its investigative complaint handling and communication techniques, but most importantly, for the impactful and constructive results of its work.
The implementation of Ombudsman recommendations to improve public services has benefited millions of Ontarians. Among those benefits:
And I could go on.
Suffice it to say that for 50 years, Ontarians have been able to count on their Ombudsman institution for help navigating government services, and they rely on us to make sure they’ve been treated fairly.
In the past decade, we’ve continued to develop expertise and resources related to municipal open meetings and codes of conduct, children’s services, and French language services.
When the responsibility for ensuring compliance with the French Language Services Act was transferred to our office in 2019, I assured everyone that the French Language Services Commissioner would be proactive, visible and able to engage with the community.
I promised that the Commissioner and our French Language Services Unit would be adequately resourced, and their work would have a constructive impact on services in French in the province.
We have kept those commitments.
I have also made it a personal priority to co-develop, with Indigenous partners, an Indigenous Services Plan that will guide and expand our service delivery, collaboration and engagement with Indigenous people and communities.
When we look honestly at the world around us, I think we can all agree—these are testing times for the institutions that give strength to democracy.
Independent oversight agencies, and even the administration of justice, are under pressure in ways we haven’t seen in generations.
That is why we must stand shoulder to shoulder with ombudsmen and democratic institutions everywhere, to reaffirm the indispensable role we play in protecting rights, ensuring accountability, and sustaining the rule of law.
On that note, I can’t think of a more fitting speaker than our distinguished guest, Ontario’s Chief Justice Michael Tulloch.
Chief Justice Tulloch is a former Crown attorney who was appointed a judge of Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice in 2003 and elevated to the Court of Appeal in 2012.
In 2022, he was appointed Chief Justice of Ontario, becoming the first Black chief justice of Ontario and in Canada.
Of course, in 2016, he headed the Independent Police Oversight Review, which, among other things, not only cited the work of this office, but called for our jurisdiction to extend to all police oversight bodies in Ontario.
Please join me in welcoming, Chief Justice Tulloch.
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Thank you, Chief Justice Tulloch, for providing us this evening with what is now the most eloquent and compelling testament to importance of the Ombudsman institution to democratic society that I have ever heard.
I will be quoting you forever! Thank you!
We are also pleased this evening to welcome Joe Martino, Director for Special Investigations Unit (SIU), Ontario’s independent oversight body that investigates cases where police are involved deaths or serious bodily harm of civilians.
Beyond his long career at the SIU, Director Martino has published extensively on policing practices, criminal case disclosure, leadership, and children’s rights.
He is a champion of independent oversight and has been vocal about the constructive change that the SIU was able to implement because of not one but two Ombudsman investigations.
Over to you, Director Martino.
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Thank you, Joe, for that perspective and for the validation of our approach to cooperative oversight and the type of appropriate and productive relationships we strive for with agencies like yours.
Folks, one of the best parts of this role is when we are able to demonstrate that an investigation can be a win-win-win, for the public sector body, the people it serves, and for our organization. It’s not about tearing things down; it’s about building better public services.
And when public agencies take our recommendations to heart, or go the extra mile to serve the public, they should get credit for doing so.
That’s why I created the Good Governance Awards this year, as part of our 50th anniversary.
I wanted to acknowledge the great collaborative work that many public sector bodies do to adopt the recommendations and best practices we share with them.
So far this year, we have recognized the OPP for greatly improving access to services in French, and the City of Hamilton for removing a $100 fee to make a complaint to its integrity commissioner.
And tonight, I’m pleased to present our third and final Good Governance Award of the year, to the Ministry of Transportation – for its proactive, transparent and decisive work in eliminating a massive backlog in road tests in the wake of the COVID pandemic.
Now, that sounds much simpler than it was.
We’re talking about a vast ministry that deals with millions of drivers, and after successive COVID shutdowns, there were more than 700,000 drivers waiting for road tests.
Of course, many of them complained to our office about how this impacted their lives. Without a road test, they couldn’t get a driver’s licence, couldn’t work, couldn’t support their families, and so on.
But Ministry staff worked closely with us to resolve these cases and implement strategies to reduce the backlog.
Ultimately, hundreds of new driver examiners were hired, and new testing locations were opened.
Throughout, the ministry was responsive to our inquiries and shared information that complainants appreciated.
This problem required a massive effort to correct, and the Ministry of Transportation tackled it head-on strategically and with determination.
For this exemplary administrative conduct, I’m pleased to present the Good Governance Award to the Ministry of Transportation, and I’d like to invite Deputy Minister Doug Jones to accept it on the Ministry’s behalf.
Thank you again to all of you for joining us this evening, to our wonderful speakers and to my stellar team for their excellent work.
Please enjoy each other’s company.
Here’s to continued collaboration for the next 50 years.
