An Ontario Election Could Not Come Soon Enough

A Commentary by Doug Draper

A report released this Monday, April 15 by Ontario’s auditor reveals that the cost of the province’s Liberal government’s scrapping plans to build gas-fired power plants in Oakville and Mississauga is much higher than the government has admitted up to now, according to a story on the front page of this Monday’s  Globe and Mail.

The outgoing Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty does a little photo op time with his old Liberal and St. Catharines MPP pal Jim Bradley, earlier this year.

The Globe story says that the estimated cost of cancelling plants has skyrocketed from $190 million for pulling the plug on both of the plants to somewhere between $250 million and $300 million for dumping the Mississauga plant project alone. The cost for pulling the plug on the Oakville plant was at least $40 million.

So we are now talking about at least a third of a billion dollars in Ontario tax money to scrap these energy plant proposals, which were drawing strong public opposition in two provincial ridings prior to the last, 2011 provincial election.

This is a scandal, and while it has become all too easy these days for partisan opponents of any government to hurl out the word scandal, it is a scandal. And it is one that metastasized before Dalton McGuinty, the previous leader of the provincial Liberals and premier for Ontario, decided, so suddenly retire from politics a year ago this past winter. It enveloped the then-Liberal government energy minister .

The provincial Liberal government, holding on tenuously with a minority of seats, may have been hoping that throwing a few bullet-ridden bodies out the door would make all of this go away. But it hasn’t.

This willful, disrespectful abuse of multi-millions of Ontario tax-dollars to scrap these plant proposals – all to ensure that what only a blind or hopelessly partisan provincial Liberal supporter can’t see was game plan to save Liberal seats during a tough election – has not gone away. It continues to dog the Liberal government, as it rightfully should, even as it fights to renew its face with the recent emergence of Kathleen Wynne as the party’s new leader and premier.

After all, McGuinty may be done and Bentley also took the fall, but others in McGuinty’s cabinet, including Wynne, St. Catharines MPP and environment minister Jim Bradley, and the health minister, Deb Matthews are still there. And I would contend that it would take most of us old enough to vote believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny again before we thought for a moment that McGuinty’s cabinet was not in on the decision to scrap these power plants.

I found it particularly disturbing to turn on the parliamentary channel and watch Bradley, who sat there in the Queen’s Park legislature this Monday with a crooked grin on his face, joining with the other cacklers in throwing back the usual cliché jibes and catcalls while members of the opposition raised questions about this issue. Here’s a politician, I once had some respect for, on a local CKTB radio Roundtable program recently, taking calls from constituents. And he was making references to the “old government” and the “new government.”

I was sitting there listening to this breathlessly, as Bradley was somehow able to talk about the “old government,” which was the McGuinty Liberal government (as opposed to the “new government” which is the Wynne Liberal government), as if his more than eight years of sitting in cabinet with McGuinty was an other-body experience for him. Anyone who can compartmentalize what they have been involved in to that extent should possibly seek help. I felt like I was listening to an audio track of ‘The Night of the Body Snatchers’.

But let’s get back to the horrendous costs of pulling the plug on these two power plants.

Premier Wynne’s response this Monday, April 15, when NDP leader Andrea Horwath, brought the whole mess up again was that the opposition parties, including her NDP members and Tim Hudak’s Conservatives, also advocated, back in 2011, for scrapping those plant plans in the midst of opposition from the communities and before the last election.” So “you can’t have it both ways,” Wynne said.

Now maybe they can’t have it both ways, but what of the government’s retort.

Wynne’s retort might have been politically clever here. You might well count on the opposition parties to take the side of residents in the Oakville and Mississauga communities in front of a hotly contested election if they think they can score some points. But let’s keep the following in mind.

First, the NDP and the Conservatives did not have access to how much it would cost to scrap those proposals. And second, and most importantly, when did this Liberal government, whether it be the “new” or the “old” one ever say; ‘Okay, we will scrap this plan or that’, just because the opposition said so. Which party was in a position of leadership here?

And further to that, wasn’t it the Liberals who always argued, going back to the days it was in opposition and the Harris Conservatives were in power, that gas-fired energy plants were cleaner and safer? If that is so, why didn’t they defend these plants at these locations at public hearings rather than caving to opposition? They certainly aren’t caving to ongoing residents’ opposition when it comes to the construction of an industrial wind energy facility in the West Lincoln area. That wouldn’t happen to do with the fact that these wind turbines would go in Conservative leader Tim Hudak’s riding would it?

If Tim Hudak was premier and cancelled a plan to build a gas-fired power plant in his riding, I wonder what Wynne, Bradley and company would have to say about that?

Are the Wynne/Bradley Liberals crazy?

Think about what more than $300 million would pay for in health care, alone, in Niagara.

It would pay for that new hospital the people of Lincoln, West Lincoln and Grimsby want to see built in their community of communities to replace the aging West Lincoln Memorial Hospital there. There would even be enough left over to keep the maternity ward and emergency centres open in Niagara’s southern tier while the government ponders over funding for a new hospital for south Niagara, as if that will ever become a reality in the next 10 to 20 years. It might even help cover some of the cost of that new interchange St. Catharines and the Niagara Region want built off the northern end of Highway 406 to accommodate traffic to the new super hospital Bradley worked so hard to see built in his riding.

The bottomline is this. What has gone on here is truly scandalous, and however much Bradley and Wynne and company think they can run away from it, they can’t hide if the rest of us are paying attention. And to quote the old line; “If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention!” So pay attention.

What we need in Ontario now is a provincial election. Let it come as early as this May. It might give a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘spring house cleaning’.

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