I think in a way there is more to that question than meets the ear or meets the eye. In addition to the point you've raised, there's also the point that if you don't have a robust legislated mandate it may take an awful lot of time before you get the information as an ombudsman. This is something we have lived as DND ombudsman or CF ombudsman, because we don't have a legislated mandate.
On asking for documents, it happened in a case that was referred to us by the Chief of Defence Staff. He referred that to the then-ombudsman and said please look into this. A week later we sent a letter saying give us everything you have on that. There were pieces of the documentation required that took one year to come to us. Point number one: you absolutely need a legislated mandate that clearly says you have the right to have access to anything you think is relevant.
The first point you raised is on the issue of missing documentation. I think in the package we just distributed you may have a copy of the report we issued at the beginning of November for the deployment of 1 CER in Kuwait. And yes indeed, going back 15 years we found in a number of instances, when we interviewed members of 1 CER, that they were telling us that there were pieces of medical reports that were somehow missing from their files. They had been assured it would be there and it was not there.
This is not right, obviously, and this should not happen. When you're stuck with it and you find that information is not there that should be there, you push the department, the CF in our case, to re-create it in the best way possible and to afford the member who is in this difficult situation all the help and assistance he or she may need with a view to re-creating, after the fact, the kinds of things he or she may require in order to, for example, in Veterans Affairs, pursue a claim for a pension. But that's not easy.