ONE MORE NON-INDEPENDENT OMBUDSMAN

It's all about appearances, not reality. In other words if you can fool 80% of the people into believing such and such an investigative body is "independent" than that is good enough. In this case it's all about Canada's military Ombudsman. He is supposed to helping military personnel by holding the Defence Department to account. It turns out that they don't much like being held accountable.

The Waterloo Region Record story is titled "Ombudsman accuses Defence Department of "insidious attacks". Apparently whenever he challenges the Departmernt to treat military personnel better or releases a report criticizing the defence department, the next thing he knows they are throwing up administrative roadblocks for his department, including financial ones. Very classy Dep't of Defence.

The solution that Gary Walbourne is proposing is that he report directly to Parliament. Currently he is suggesting that the Minister of defence's responses are "nebulous" at best.