Ontario Hydro sticker shock all thanks to Liberals’ mismanagement – by Lorrie Goldstein (Toronto Sun – July 20, 2017)

http://www.torontosun.com/

As a new shocking Fraser Institute report on electricity pricing in Ontario reveals, real people suffer when governments are incompetent. The governments in this case are the Liberal ones headed first by Dalton McGuinty and now Kathleen Wynne, who have turned Ontario’s energy sector into a financial train wreck from which there will be no easy or painless escape for generations to come.

The numbers in the Fraser study, titled “Evaluating Electricity Price Growth,” are damning. Torontonians today pay $720 more annually for electricity than the average Canadian. Ontario electricity prices skyrocketed 71% between 2008 and 2016.

That’s more than double the Canadian average of 34%, 2.5 times more than the rise in household incomes, four times the inflation rate, and 4.5 times the growth rate of the economy. In 2015-16 alone, Ontario electricity prices increased 15%, 2.5 times the national average of 6%.

This is what’s plunged hundreds of thousands of Ontarians into energy poverty, left seniors torn between eating and paying their hydro bills, and driven hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs out of Ontario.

The Fraser study says Ontario’s runaway hydro prices are directly linked to the government’s phase-out of coal energy without doing its due diligence, poorly structured long-term renewable energy contracts, and other policy choices.

For the rest of this article: http://www.torontosun.com/2017/07/20/hydro-sticker-shock-all-thanks-to-liberals-mismanagement