Paul Dubé
Office of the Ombudsman of Ontario
Paul Dubé is Ontario's Ombudsman. In June 2025, he published a report calling the province's correctional system a "growing crisis" requiring "urgent reform," documenting 6,870 complaints to his office in 2024-25 — a 55% year-over-year increase and the largest single-year jump on record. He separately launched an investigation into conditions at Maplehurst Correctional Complex following the December 2023 crisis intervention response that a Superior Court judge later called "akin to torture."
Connected Scandals
Over 157 inmates were improperly released from Ontario's dangerously overcrowded provincial jails between 2021 and 2025 — six remain at large as of April 2026. Solicitor General Michael Kerzner told the legislature they were all caught "instantaneously." Global News FOI documents proved that was false. Kerzner apologized "unreservedly." At the same Maplehurst facility running at 175% capacity, correctional officers zip-tied 200 inmates in their underwear for two days — and a judge stayed first-degree murder charges as a result.
Dubé's office documented a record 6,870 correctional complaints in 2024-25 — a 55% jump — and publicly called for "urgent reform" of Ontario's overcrowded jails. He launched a separate investigation into Maplehurst following the crisis intervention response that led to the murder charge stay. His annual report is the primary official source for the scale of Ontario's correctional complaint crisis.
Ontario's Ombudsman found adults with developmental disabilities are being held in hospital beds — sometimes for years — because the province never built the community housing and supports it promised, producing what his report calls "a modern form of institutionalization by default."
Ombudsman of Ontario and author of Lost in Transition, released November 25, 2025, which investigated whether the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services and the Ministry of Health are taking adequate steps to address the inappropriate hospitalization of adults with developmental disabilities. The report invokes Pierre Berton's 1960 exposé of the Huronia Regional Centre and frames the current situation as institutionalization by default. It follows his 2016 report Nowhere to Turn on the same social services ministry. Only the report's executive summary was reviewed, so its specific recommendations are not characterized here.