Ontario Economy

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

The cost of Ontario’s Green Energy Act, at $1,100 per year per household, dwarfs the cost of cancelled gas plants

Filled with umbrage that his record as steward of Ontario’s electricity market is under parliamentary review, former Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty more or less passed the buck down to his staff. Appearing before a legislative committee on Tuesday, Mr. McGuinty became irritated and accusatory, saying the search for emails and other documents deleted by underlings is nothing more than a political witch hunt over his decision to cancel two gas-powered generating stations at a cost of at least $585-million.

Mr. McGuinty is actually getting off too easy. The gas plant cash drain is far outweighed by the burden on Ontarians of Mr. McGuinty’s sprawling green energy fiasco. I say we should forget about the gas plants and the $585-million in wasted money. It’s gone. Instead, let’s order up all the emails and documents — through maybe half a dozen energy ministers under the premier’s control — as they reached the policy and economic decisions that created the 2010 Green Energy and Economy Act (GEA). That act will cost Ontarians 10 to 20 cancelled gas plants.

Let us see the emails and communications and meeting notes between bureaucrats and ministers, between Ontario Power Authority and the government, between all of them and the NGOs and industry activists who lobbied, promoted and sold the GEA policy disaster. There’s the $7-billion deal with Samsung, the false data on carbon emissions, the job creation calculations, the colossal giveaways to wind and solar entrepreneurs who formed lobby groups. On it goes.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Ontario Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli tried to put a happy face on last week’s rejigging of the province’s massive renewable energy contract with a Samsung-led Korean consortium. Scaling back the original $9.7-billion deal struck in 2010 to $6-billion was supposed to signal Premier Kathleen Wynne’s determination to inject a measure of sanity into the green energy policies she inherited from Dalton McGuinty and his overzealous electricity czar, George Smitherman.

“With this updated agreement, we’ll continue to create good jobs, while maintaining Ontario’s commitment to clean, renewable energy,” Mr. Chiarelli insisted.

He boasted that the downsized 20-year contract, under which Samsung will produce about 1,400 megawatts of wind and solar power instead of 2,500 MW, represents a $24 reduction on the average annual residential electricity bill. Considering that the average Ontario consumer paid more than $1,700 for electricity in 2012, this wouldn’t be much to get excited about, even if it actually resulted in a 1.4 per cent cut on their power bill.

But Ontarians have only begun to pay for the the green energy “vision” of Mr. McGuinty and Mr. Smitherman. Electricity rates are forecast to rise by nearly 50 per cent as the government moves toward its target of adding 10,700 MW of renewable power to the grid.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

In the immortal phrase of the fictional lawyer Jackie Chiles of Seinfeld fame, Dalton McGuinty was egregious, outlandish, disingenuous and outrageous.

The former Ontario premier was appearing for a second star turn Tuesday before the all-party legislative committee probing the gas plants fiasco of his government.

(The controversial plants in Oakville and Mississauga were abruptly cancelled, the latter announced as a Liberal party campaign promise, and the costs — at least $585-million is the best estimate — consistently downplayed and lowballed by the government.)

If possible, McGuinty the private citizen is more arrogant, less forthcoming and more hypocritical than the politician McGuinty. He was asked back in the wake of a withering report earlier this month from the province’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian.

Sparked by a complaint from New Democrat MPP Peter Tabuns, who is also the most effective questioner on the committee, the probe revealed that senior political staff in Mr. McGuinty’s office were routinely deleting all emails in what she found was likely an attempt to avoid scrutiny.

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The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian appeared before a legislative committee probing the government’s decision to cancel power plants in Oakville and Mississauga.

Former premier Dalton McGuinty is unrepentant about the controversial decision to cancel two gas plants, lashing out at his critics for being hyper-partisan and interested only in the demise of the Liberal party.

McGuinty, who appeared Tuesday before a legislative committee probing the cancellations, said he regretted “that it ended up costing as much as it does, but ultimately it is the right decision.”

Despite his sometimes combative defence of his political legacy, McGuinty admitted “we failed as a government” on document retention training. He was referring to Information and Privacy Commission Ann Cavoukian’s finding that top Liberal political staffers destroyed emails and documents contrary to the Archives and Recordkeeping Act.

“I’m calling it the way I see it . . . there is no genuine effort here on the part of the opposition committee members to seek out the truth,” he later told reporters, emphasizing that he’s “not sure Ontarians understand the real complexion” of a committee dominated by the opposition and focused on embarrassing the Liberals.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

It’s always instructive to see how a government frames an announcement that is backtracking on one of its own initiatives. Conveniently for the Ontario Liberals, they are amassing considerable experience in this regard.

So, when the government on Thursday dropped the news that it was restructuring its 2010 wind-power deal with Samsung, it presented it in terms of extended job commitments and savings to electricity ratepayers. Samsung was guaranteeing jobs until 2016, instead of 2015, and the government was now only committing to buy $6-billion of Samsung’s renewable power at well above market rates, down from $9.7-billion in the original contract. Hooray for savings!

Those extended job commitments, though, are a result of Samsung’s having missed targets in the original contract; it now has more time to meet them. And that reduction in spending? It comes as Samsung, which won the original contract absent a competition, agrees to drop its own investment in the province from $7-billion to $5-billion, with projects expected to generate 1,369 megawatts of energy, down steeply from 2,500 megawatts in the first deal.

Ontario will be paying less, and receiving less. This is probably not the result of a particularly hard-fought negotiation. What’s more notable are the things that the announcement from Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli did not mention, for example the 16,000 jobs that the original contract was said to create when it was announced in 2010.

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