Ontario at it again...

The Ontario Ombudsman's office has been hard at work with the appointment of Andre Marin as Ombudsman.

Their office has found that the Ministry of Community and Social Services Disability Support Program has been understaffed since the inception of the program in 1997 to handle the load of disability support applications. The full Ombudsman's report is here.

Initially the program was expected to recieve 400 applications a week but the current number is up to 700 per week. That meant that applications were in backlog, in which decisions took about 8 months to decide even in the most serious cases. Upon backlog the regulations to the Act only intended to pay recipients 4 months of backlogged benefits - not the full time frame it took to process and decide the application.

What is more irritating is that Sandra Pupatello, Minister of Community and Social Services at the time, lied to the media when her Ministry was put on notice of an Ombudsman's investigation.

She stated publicly that she only knew about the backlogs from March 15, 2006 for "at least six months"

It was pointed out in this Ombudsman's report that former Minister Pupatello knew about it since September 2004 as she was given a presentation by her staff to put forward a position to the Ontario Auditor for the same problems that was supposed to fix those issues.

Perhaps the Liberals could smell a another rat coming from the Ombudsman's office and moved Minister Pupatello to a new Ministry - Education

The Ombudsman wants the Province of Ontario to reimburse those disabled Ontarians who've had to wait too long to get benefits for the months they were not covered under the regulations.

The new Minister, Madeleine Meilleur, said the Province won't reimburse the applicants for their mistakes. See The Spec's report here.

It's probably going to take a class action lawsuit that may see a judge agree with retroactive payment plus increase the amount to include pain and suffering. The same could be done in a human rights application to the Tribunal to make a judgement against the Ministry especially if the Minister knew about the problems and did nothing to fix it showing contempt for disabled people in Ontario.

If they had fixed the problem by hiring more staff and having better projections in the first place they probably wouldn't have to face a liability rather it would have cost the Ministry approximately $900,00 for the cost of extra staffing - as opposed to as high as $12 million.