First, on the costing of our operation, when I'm reading the transcripts and I see these costs that are thrown about and when you throw all these inflated numbers around, it scares people off and they don't want to provide any power to the office because we don't have the funds.
There was a suggestion that I read in the transcript, for example, that you need to fund the office with $8 million or $9 million, and then you'd have to create a parallel office in the department, which would be another $8 million or $9 million. I don't know what they're talking about. I oversee all the provincial government, 500 ministries and agencies. There's no shadow organization in the Ontario government to respond to me. So I don't know where....To me, that is again a defeatist approach. Are you going to have a shadow ombudsman's office in the department to keep an eye on the main office? Again, you'd have an overlap in bureaucracies.
We take 24,000 complaints a year in the Ontario ombudsman's office. We have a budget of $9.6 million to oversee all of those, including dozens and dozens of administrative tribunals. Of our case resolution, 90% is done by using diplomacy and soft skills. I call it the “soft glove” approach. You try to convince, informally, the vast majority of those.
Then we take about six out of the pile to conduct systemic field investigations. These are investigations where you investigate to the core. You interview witnesses. You build transcripts. You'll avail yourself of the formal authorities of the office. We do that in about six cases.
Right now, for example, we're investigating the lottery corporation in Ontario. That is a systemic investigation, because there are issues that have been raised about insiders padding their pockets with winnings that they've fraudulently acquired. So that is a systemic investigation involving billions of dollars in Ontario. That's an example of our formal ways.
Our phones are ringing every day, our Internet, to the tune of 24,000 cases a year.