The Ombudsperson and the war of attrition with systems of escalation

This essay is in response to the closure of my complaint by the Office of the Ombudsperson of British Columbia. It documents my family’s experience navigating the education complaint system, the Teacher Regulation Branch, and the Ombudsperson itself. It exists to show how a system meant to protect fairness becomes one that delays, deflects, and exhausts those who seek help.

When the Ombudsperson closed my file, the letter arrived polished with civility, every sentence measured to soothe. It began by thanking me for my time, moved through a careful expression of sympathy, and ended with the assurance that my experience would help others in the future.

Beneath that soft architecture of empathy, I felt the weight of bureaucratic finality. I had already spent years inside the machinery of education complaints—school level escalations, district processes, ministry escalations, the TRB filing—and this final correspondence felt another turn of a long spiral.

When I read their explanation, I saw the translation of our family’s ordeal into a data point.

They wrote that:

• too much time had passed,
• staff had moved on,
• the district had eventually offered something closer to what I had sought, and
• under their legislation, they could decline to investigate if no direct benefit to me could be achieved.

They assured me this experience would still “help others,” folded anonymously into a larger systemic review of all districts.

In that moment, I understood the alchemy by which lived harm becomes aggregate evidence. My children’s lost years of schooling, my hours of documentation, our despair and exhaustion—all converted into anonymised material for a report that will travel upward, perhaps to the legislature, polished and toothless. The gesture of inclusion conceals an erasure: we are thanked for contributing to systemic learning even as the system refuses to learn from us directly.

As we are converted into data points, I wonder whether the causes of our harm will remain tethered to the numbers. My family does not fit easily into institutional categories: I am an AuDHD, non-gender-conforming person with a degree in women’s studies and a history of campaigning for fairness; my children are AuDHD, gifted, asynchronous learners with histories of gender non-conformity. We are affluent enough to have expectations, but not affluent enough to buy refuge in an a special independent school. My children are twins, which means that every advocacy effort is doubled and every institutional tolerance halved. Since kindergarten I sought support for my daughter, whose anxiety made school unbearable, and I was treated as excessive—too detailed, too insistent, too much. They were already doing so much for her brother…

These particulars are not incidental; they illustrate how the intersection of gender, neurodivergence, and family structure exposes a system that privileges normative, singular, neurotypical family models and marginalises those who fall outside its design. They describe the very coordinates of exclusion. Families like mine reveal how discrimination operates by design, not by accident—how policy and procedure combine to reward compliance and punish complexity. I fear that when our experience is folded into the Ombudsperson’s systemic report, these structural dimensions will be excised in the name of neutrality. Our story will be rendered as a sad administrative misfire rather than what it truly represents: evidence of a system built to exhaust those whose existence exceeds their template.

The illusion of systemic justice

The Teacher Regulation Branch, the Ministry of Education, and the Office of the Ombudsperson all belong to the same state apparatus, interconnected within the machinery of government. They are presented as separate oversight bodies, but in practice they function as a single system protecting itself. This absence of external accountability reveals that what appears as review is often self‑preservation, where the state examines its own conduct under the illusion of impartiality.

The Ombudsperson’s mandate sounds noble: to ensure fairness, administrative integrity, and accountability in public bodies. Yet when the office declines to investigate—citing time passed, staff changes, or partial improvements—it exposes a deeper contradiction. Its commitment to fairness extends only to the maintenance of its own order, reducing justice to procedure. Fairness becomes an internal measure rather than a moral compass. The phrase “no benefit to you personally” hides the truth: this office defines benefit narrowly, as tangible outcome, and avoids any process that might expose institutional failure or demand remedy.

Also, they say no benefit to ‘me’, when I’ve always been seeking relief for our whole family—a phrasing that subtly repositions the complainant from representing collective harm to appearing as a solitary petitioner, shifting moral weight and responsibility away from systemic obligation and toward an individualised sense of disappointment.

Even a modest gesture of accountability—a public acknowledgment of failure, a reprimand, even a symbolic sanction—would have carried enormous meaning for our family and helped my children hear, from someone in authority, that what happened to them was unfair and undeserved. It would have affirmed that what happened mattered and was unacceptable.

Instead, the Ombudsperson reasoned that because their own delay, staff turnover, and the district’s late concessions rendered the situation “unlike to benefit me personally,” they were justified in declining to act.

Their institutional inertia became our own disqualification.

Just a Parent

Their letter turned backlog into moral logic, as though time itself absolved wrongdoing.

When the principal who oversaw the events that shaped our distress moved to another school, the district treated the transition as an administrative matter, neither remedial nor accountable. She told my children it was her choice, and perhaps it was; but within the broader structure, her departure served the same function as every institutional handover—it allowed the harm to be treated as history. I cannot claim to know the motive for this transition, yet if one were to consult a public relations expert on how to minimise reputational damage after a controversy, reassigning a leader quietly to a new post would be among the most effective strategies. This is the paradox of institutional ethics: an action that appears neutral or even kind can simultaneously perform containment, closing the story without confronting its substance. The Ombudsperson cited that change as one of several reasons an investigation would serve no purpose. Yet the consequences remained, lodged in our daily life.

The architecture of delay

Procedural timelines and deferrals create uneven terrain where delay itself becomes a discriminatory tool. Disabled children, single parents, low-income families, and racialised communities bear the greatest cost of waiting, revealing how bureaucratic time privileges those already advantaged while exhausting those most vulnerable.

It is self evident to me that a month is an immense span in a child’s world. Each week of exclusion or stagnation compounds, especially for children already struggling with unmet needs. Learning loss is not just academic; it erodes confidence, social connection, and self-concept. When institutions tolerate delay—under the pretext of “process” or “complexity”—they ignore that children live in real time, not bureaucratic time. A single month outside the classroom can recalibrate an entire developmental path, creating ripple effects that extend through adolescence and beyond. Delay, in this sense, is not procedural; it is generational harm.

In May 2023, after a meeting with senior district staff, a comprehensive plan was written to ensure that my children would finally receive meaningful support. By autumn, the plan had evaporated. Nothing was implemented, and by December I was told that nothing would be, that their appearance of survival was evidence of their lack of need. What followed was a year of attrition disguised as communication. Each escalation met with courtesy and delay, each assurance dissolved into the next promise.

They could review process, but not pace; assess fairness, but not urgency—a disavowal that exposes a paradox at the heart of their mandate. How can an office that refuses responsibility for timeliness claim to safeguard fairness, when procedural fairness itself depends on timely action? In practice, this meant the district could violate its own timelines indefinitely while oversight bodies remained spectators to the erosion of trust.

The year that followed illustrated how delay becomes harm. My daughter endured physical harassment and invasive comments. The school’s inaction forced her—and eventually me—to call the police when safety could no longer be negotiated through channels. Each new incident added to the record while eroding our belief that intervention was possible. By September 2024, when ineffective instructional support left her working in hallways and falling behind, the Ombudsperson’s office had still not advanced my complaint.

By November 2024, when the Urgent Intervention Process concluded, we were already exhausted. The report offered no new support, prescribing behaviourist strategies foreign to my children’s needs and to our family’s ethics. I objected, and the objection was recorded. Recording became the system’s replacement for repair. When I escalated again in January 2025, requesting leadership change for my daughter’s case, I was met with affirmation of district confidence in the same leadership that had failed her. My daughter called the police once, and the principal told them not to come. She was hurt again multiple times after that, until I had to call the police.

In May 2025, the Ombudsperson chose to pause their assessment of my complaint while the Teacher Regulation Branch investigation was ongoing. This was stated explicitly in their correspondence—they would “wait and assess after the TRB investigation is concluded.” I accepted this as temporary. Yet as months passed, the TRB process stalled. When I contacted the Ombudsperson in July and August 2025 to report that the TRB had failed to provide an updated timeline, the office did not intervene or inquire. They did not contact the TRB or attempt to establish expectations for timely completion.

Their decision to wait quietly through another agency’s delay meant that oversight ceased to function. It was not a pause; it was withdrawal—a moment revealing the absurd circularity of one inept system claiming it could not act because another inept system was delayed.

The failure of purpose

The Ombudsperson is not an independent entity separate from the government it reviews; it is part of the same administrative framework it claims to oversee. This makes its posture of neutrality an act of self-preservation, shielding the state from confronting its own failures while appearing to arbitrate them.

Every institution I have engaged with speaks in the language of benevolence. Each principal, director, and officer begins with stories of their long service and their care for children. Each system of escalation reveres its own process, as though reciting a creed. Every conversation begins with care and ends with exhaustion. These gestures of goodwill have become ritual—an invocation of integrity that absorbs my time, energy, and faith while changing little.

The Ombudsperson fits seamlessly into this choreography of virtue. The office presents itself as neutral, principled, and empathetic; yet neutrality becomes avoidance, and empathy a substitute for action. They write in soft tones, acknowledging my perseverance, assuring me that my story will contribute to systemic learning, while sidestepping any duty to intervene. Each paragraph of civility performs compassion while delivering nothing concrete. Their words, like those of district and ministry officials before them, reassert the institution’s goodness rather than repair harm. What they call professionalism feels like self-congratulation at scale.

Every player in the chain—district administrators, ministry staff, oversight officers—draws from the same script: we are doing our best; we care deeply; we have limits. Each conversation becomes an exchange of empathy rather than accountability. The process consumes me: hours of correspondence, meetings, documentation, and emotional labour offered to people who are always kind and immovable. Their civility functions as containment, ensuring outrage remains polite and injustice procedural.

When I look back on these years, I see not villains but caretakers of inertia—people trained to sound good while doing very little.

Just a Parent

The cycle of attrition as policy

Attrition functions as a structural filter that silently removes from participation the very families most affected by discrimination, ensuring their absence from decision‑making and future policy reform.

Attrition is not an accident—it is the system’s operating principle, a structure designed for despair and exhaustion. It ensures that even well‑meaning people, including leaders, yield to processes that drain initiative and disperse responsibility until progress becomes impossible. The length of time required to pursue complaints, the fragmentation of oversight, the courteous deferrals between offices—all ensure that justice expires before it matures. Each family’s exhaustion becomes self‑regulation, reducing caseload without reform. The system depends on the slow erosion of parental energy and the quiet decay of hope. Every act of advocacy exacts a physical and emotional toll: hours of lost sleep, strained health, frayed relationships, and the dull ache of knowing that care for one’s child has become indistinguishable from combat. Every act of persistence demands another piece of the body, another day of endurance, another recalibration of what survival looks like.

The Ombudsperson’s choice to substitute timely intervention with a future systemic investigation—one with no enforceable mandate—sustains the district’s impunity while inflating expectations for those who turned to it for help. 

Just a Parent

Parents are told to wait for the greater good, to believe endurance itself will produce reform. Yet the cost of that endurance is measured in our children’s lost years, our health, our depleted time, and our faith in public accountability. Whatever report emerges will reach families who have already paid for it in suffering. Its findings may be factual, perhaps even eloquent, but they will never balance what has been taken from us.

What the Ombudsperson’s choice has done

The decision to suspend individual oversight in favour of a systemic review has changed more than procedure—it has reshaped our expectations of justice. It has taught families to equate patience with virtue and to confuse observation with intervention. We are left with the paradox of hope built from despair: believing something meaningful will come from a process that has already failed us. Each time I reread their correspondence, I see the quiet certainty of an office convinced it serves a greater purpose, unaware that its restraint has deepened public harm. The systemic investigation may produce recommendations, but for those of us who pleaded for timely action, its findings will confirm that oversight was traded for optics.

Accountability without remedy is theatre

This ritual of empathy mirrors the state’s historical pattern of selective recognition—where gestures of compassion obscure systemic harm toward marginalised groups and turn acknowledgment into a substitute for accountability.

The closure letters arrived as performances of kindness—meticulous in tone, immaculate in structure, and hollow in effect. Reading them felt like pressing on a bruise: a ritualised form of compassion that demanded composure in return. Each one asked me to accept civility as consolation, to feel gratitude for acknowledgment instead of repair. I felt the stillness that follows when the system thanks you for your suffering, as if endurance itself were a gift to governance. The letters reminded me that language can soothe and wound in the same breath, that empathy without consequence becomes another form of harm.

When oversight bodies issue apologies without consequence, they turn justice into ritual. The letters that close files read as scripts of compassion while confirming the permanence of loss. Families are thanked for courage, their stories anonymised, their children still at home. Closure is mistaken for resolution. The Ombudsperson’s polished language conceals the enormity of what it denies: the chance to be made whole.

An Ombudsperson who cannot imagine justice that restores the harmed cannot lead an office charged with defending fairness. Resignation becomes moral necessity, a gesture toward renewal. Leadership that fears advocacy cannot safeguard democracy. The integrity of oversight depends on its willingness to confront power, not comfort it.

What comes next

This site exists because families continue to live inside the administrative afterlife of harm. Our cases are closed, yet our children’s futures remain compromised. The only path forward is collective truth‑telling: turning attrition into record, and record into power. We wait for a systemic investigation that replaced timely help, knowing it cannot compensate for what was lost. 

We call on the Office of the Ombudsperson to produce a report that functions as a comprehensive map of systemic discrimination, not a catalogue of moving testimonies. Personal stories matter only insofar as they illuminate structural design; the investigation must connect each account to policy architecture, administrative hierarchy, and measurable outcome.

The report must go beyond moral recognition. It must explicitly identify the classes of citizens harmed by design—disabled students, neurodivergent children, families of twins and multiples, gender-diverse students, racialised and Indigenous learners, and parents who are themselves disabled or neurodivergent. Each group experiences exclusion through different mechanisms, but the pattern is unified: the system allocates access to safety and education through a logic of containment and scarcity.

We therefore urge the Ombudsperson to deliver findings that:

• Classify the discriminatory effects of current policies on all affected populations.
• Distinguish foreseeable structural design from unintended consequence.
• Quantify the social, educational, and health costs attached to these patterns.
• Recommend concrete corrective measures, enforceable timelines, and reparative mechanisms.

Such a report would become the definitive evidentiary record of state-engineered discrimination in British Columbia’s education system—a document that can support legislative reform, tribunal actions, and constitutional litigation. Anything less than a full articulation of design-level inequity will read as selective compassion, preserving bureaucratic innocence while children continue to absorb the cost.

The families who endured this system do not need another elegy for tragedy. We need a document that exposes, with legal precision, how the harm was built—and in doing so, provides the foundation for justice.