Council shouldn’t get to decide the ombudsman's future

It took a week for the details to come out, but we now know the specific outcome of last week’s city council debate on renewing the contract of ombudsman Fiona Crean for a second term.

Per a city news release, council voted to shorten the required notice period in Crean’s contract from 12 months to six months. So the decision on whether to reappoint for another five-year term will ultimately be made next year — after the election.

That’s a sensible decision. Crean has done good and important work in her position, especially on TCHC HR practices, TCHC eviction of seniors and issues surrounding the civic appointments process. There’s nothing in her record that points to a need to replace her.

But despite things ultimately going the right way, the whole debate was hard to watch. Because councillors really shouldn’t have been having the debate at all.

The ombudsman’s office exists to be “an impartial investigator of residents' complaints about the administration of city government.” That means she’s tasked with being a constant critic of city government and the people elected to oversee it.

However, that role is complicated by current policy, which allows the ombudsman to serve two five-year terms, with the second term subject to approval from two-thirds of the full 45-member city council.

In other words, if the ombudsman wants to keep her job she needs to win the approval of a supermajority from the people she’s tasked with criticizing.

It all adds up to an inherently broken system. An ombudsman that could easily win support from 30 members of council would be inherently suspect. The job is not about making friends and winning allies. It’s about holding feet to the fire. It’s about making politicians sweat. It’s about using what Coun. James Pasternak worried was “unnecessarily harsh language.”

Unfortunately, the ombudsman’s ability to do that job is currently threatened by a reappointment process that creates the possibility -- however unlikely -- of an ombudsman quieting criticisms in order to keep the job.

Fixing this isn’t complicated. There’s already precedent with the integrity commissioner, an accountability officer position that comes with a fixed, non-renewable five-year term. The limitation was justified by the city manager in a 2009 report by “the nature of the function and degree of interface with Members of Council.”

It’s clear now that the ombudsman’s position also includes a “degree of interface with Members of Council,” because many really don’t like it when she criticizes programs they’re involved with, and it should probably be made non-renewable as well. I’d suggest a longer single term for the ombudsman, but that’s up for debate.

None of this means Crean’s critics had any justification for standing up against her contract renewal last week. If they were motivated by a desire to eliminate potential conflicts of interest that come with an ombudsman subject to council reappointment, they would have spoken out long ago about the need to change it.

They didn’t.

Going forward, councillors who are genuinely interested in accountability would be wise to consider whether they should ever have a debate like this again. Because is there anything accountable about an ombudsman who needs to win political support to keep doing her job?