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Let’s look at the cold hard facts.

All 13 employees working for Boileau are being transferred to the ombudsman — another officer of parliament. All of them. Presumably Boileau could join his gang too, but he wouldn’t be the top guy, of course. So, he said he’d continue drawing his salary until May 1, doing I don’t know what.

Boileau has said that however great Dube is, Dube doesn’t have the same francophone advocacy platform as he enjoyed. On that point, he is completely wrong.

I was the Ontario ombudsman for over 10 years and advocated for a better mandate over the public sector, better treatment for children with autism and all types of other measures that I saw were part of my advocacy role.

In a speech I gave 10 years ago, I said: “The ombudsman acts as a barometer that forecasts storms that may blow over the public from high places in government or the business world; we are a horsefly that buzzes and bites at the slow-moving beast of bureaucracy; we are an oilcan that helps fix big organizations when they get rusty and creaky — and we’re a safety valve for pent-up public dissatisfaction with state and corporate juggernauts.”

The fact that jellyfish Dube likes to work in a stealth fashion is more telling of him than how his office should work.

As far as complaints are concerned, Boileau took in all of 315 complaints, but only 186 were deemed admissible. His budget ballooned from mid-$700,000 in 2008-09 to $2.7 million in 2017-18. That’s currently over $14,500 per complaint. How does that make sense in any fiscal environment, especially the current dismal one?

Is it any wonder that Premier Doug Ford decided to move the free-spending Boileau’s office into Dube’s? And as Ford has promised, not one job was lost and the responsibilities of independently fending for Franco-Ontarians were untouched.

Maybe this is a wake-up call for Dube, who has quickly returned the ombudsman’s office to the backwaters it used to thrive in.

In the meantime, as the symposium advertises, it’s “free, but places are limited.”

Who said you can’t get your cake and eat it too?