Specialty Ombudsman Offices: The New Breed of Structural Heretics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
*The author wishes to acknowledge the invaluable research assistance of Rafal Szymanski, B.A. student at the University of New Brunswick, in the preparation of this paper. 1 Specialty Ombudsman Offices in Ottawa such as the Military Ombudsman and Veterans Ombudsman are becoming more numerous, even though the federal government has never seen fit to establish a classic parliamentary Ombudsman Office for the whole public service. In addition, there are other independent officers of Parliament without the “Ombudsman ” designation who fulfill ombudsman-like duties such as the Official Languages Commissioner and the Correctional Investigator. We also find that the term “Ombudsman ” is widely used today in both the private and public sectors for executive customer-service desks or as a synonym for dispute resolution, as in the case of the Canada Post Ombudsman. Purists have occasionally bemoaned this spread in the use of the term, seeing it as a watering-down of the concept (Rowat 2007a and 2007b). At the very least, this situation leads us to recall J. E. Hodgetts ’ authoritative depiction of the origins and development of the Canadian public service between 1867 and 1970 – The Canadian Public Service (1973). He used the term “structural heretics” to refer to the myriad of non-departmental administrative organizations that comprise the public sector – that is, those entities that constituted a departure from the ministerial department model (1973: 138-56). His categorization included mainly crown corporations, regulatory agencies, and advisory bodies plus an assortment of other entities. Hodgetts did not, however, include coverage of the Ombudsman probably because, at the time of writing, it had yet to advance from being a new idea to a fixture in Canada. Though he did make the following very brief mention in respect to the
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".