As Premier Dalton McGuinty prorogued the Ontario legislature and announced his retirement last month, he would have known that some of the darker secrets of his government’s handling of energy policy would soon come to light. Today, those secrets — until now buried in 56,000 pages of released but unreadable documents — are appearing in the open.In sordid and alarming detail, the documents show that the McGuinty government’s cancellation of gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga are likely to cost as much as $1.3-billion, possibly more. Killing the Oakville plant and moving it to Bath will alone burden Ontario ratepayers and taxpayers with costs that exceed $1-billion.
More here: The government didn’t care about the magnitude of the costs, only the visibility of the costs.
When the sh*t hits or is about to hit the fan you prorogue. McGuinty can now continue on putting up wind turbines and anything else he wants to do unchallenged.
Waiting for the neo-liberal media to obsess and front page this prorogue and abuse of trust....
Yeah, it will never happen.
Jail time now for this lying SOB.
My guess is that there's no time for Cdn media to report this at any length, due to their coverage of Benghazi.
Actually Mark, the media is not obsessing over McGuinty's prorogation or much of anything else concerning his pillaging of Ontario. He has taken us from bread basket of the country to an economic nightmare, the likes of which this province has never witnessed.
The branch of the institutional left that masquerades as media will forgive all sins committed on behalf of or rationalized under the church of Green or those of fellow travelers.
BC had to pay Alcan half a billion when Campbell killed the Kemano completion project and the media all but ignored it. Campbell was often attacked by the media but usually for attempts at doing the right things.
Please, someone somewhere take this idiot off our hands. We in Ontario will be very grateful. In fact, we will throw in Joe Fontana as a bonus offer if you take Dalton right now. We will prepay the postage. No returns accepted.
Jail time. That's it, he needs to be arrested and charged with fraud.
Tom Adams.
Of socialist McGuinty: "In taking command of pricing,".
...-
"Green zombie"
"56,000 documents reveal Ontario’s energy disaster"
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/10/31/green-zombie/
Mark at November 1, 2012 12:41 PM
At least McGuinty has effectively neutralised prorogation as a future attack angle. We should thank him for it. Actually, McGuinty has eliminated whole lines of attack in his haste to save his own skin. I am thinking the left is furious with him right now.
Jail's too good.
Unfortunately I live in Ontario. Unfortunately I get to talk to teachers, some of whom are unfortunately related to me. To this day, McGuinty's only failure to them, is the fact that he asked them for a wage freeze this year. In their own words, these teachers union morons are whining that McGuinty wanted to take all the economic issues and put it on the backs of the poor teachers. But they still want more windmills and magic mirrors. It's all still Bush's fault.
Unfortunately they are allowed access to young minds.
The really dumb thing about the generating plant to be built at Bath is that it is a stone's throw from another generating plant that runs at about one per cent of its capacity due to low demand.
Consider, too, that Ontario has to unload its surplus electricity to American customers at a price lower than the cost to produce it.
So we Ontario residents not only pay outrageous electricity rates to subsidize McGuinty's green fantasies but we also subsidize American consumers.
McGuinty needs to do the perp walk.
I just knew that throwing away my favorite picture was premature. The gift that keeps on giving.
http://quixoteslaststand.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/untitled2.png
Jailing him would be unfair and inhumane....to the other criminals in the penitentiary.
I'm going to the Quebec border tonight to add two letters to a highway sign.
"Welcome to OntariOWE"
"The Ontario government has lost its ethical and managerial bearings in the oversight of the power system. The proper course of action is a comprehensive moratorium on all electrical infrastructure spending and new commitments until all projects are thoroughly reviewed for their impact on consumers." -- Tom Adams, "Green Zombie", Financial Post, October 31, 2012.
Tom's first sentence is correct. However, his second sentence is off the mark because it entrenches the status quo and flies in the face of his first sentence: who would one expect to conduct the "thorough" reviews he seeks? Why the government, of course, probably in the guise of the Ontario Energy Board.
The OEB can pretty much be counted on, if experience is any indication, to set up its usual impenetrably complicated, contradictory and convoluted evaluation system that would play directly into the hands of those who are responsible for this mess -- the expansive cartel of industry "stakeholders" from lawyers, environmentalists and would-be third-party corporate players (usually from out-of-province) seeking subsidies for non-economic projects to the government- and municipally-owned utilities themselves and their unions.
I've known Tom a bit in the past and he's a really smart guy. I know that he knows that there is no political solution to the electricity sector in Ontario -- there's only privatization, of which he has been a strong advocate in the past. Tom well knows that the biggest part of the problem in the sector is business performance -- currently, the sector is a big gravy train that hides behind the convenient cover story/myth, which the NDP-types naively trumpet and propagate, that government as decision-maker is acting in the public interest.
Why not just accept reality and run the electricity system like the natural gas distribution business in Ontario? In other words, let it run itself, with profit-maximizing, capital expenditure-optimizing investor-owned utilities in a proper adversarial position versus all the other industry hangers-on, with the OEB as light-handed umpire -- like Mike Harris said he was going to do, but never seemed to get around to. Under that arrangement, there'd be a lot fewer hangers-on and a lot less cost. On the gas distribution side, pipelines get built, people get to heat their homes and gas prices rise and fall -- and they're going to fall even more in future if the environmentalists aren't allowed to get their meat-hooks into the fracking revolution -- and nobody ever hears a word about any of it! Imagine! We could even write a new verse to the song...
Hudak's actually got a great plan on how to achieve privatization -- by allowing the public sector pension funds to have first right of refusal on the shares of the utilities. If he ties this and similar privatization intiatives together with a deal with the unions to lower government payroll costs, he'd have a real winner which would drive Ontario's conservatives to the polls in Stephen Harper numbers.
Why is it again that, given the looming pension cost crisis, Ontario's public sector pension funds have to invest overseas when the Ontario government is sitting on a whole bunch of under-performing commercial or near-commercial assets that the funds would be able to turn around and make pillars of economic growth rather than millstones around the economy's neck as they are now?
Oh, right, I forgot -- the CBC's in love with Andrea Horwath and we can't deviate from left-wing orthodoxy in polite company here in Ontario.
Maybe Ontarians will get lucky and Dalton will move to B.C. in a new position as Christy Clark's advisor.
"Sob".
One of those gas plants is being built right beside
the decommissioned Lambton Coal generating plant.
Area politicians have been hounding the McGuinty government for years to retrofit the existing facility to gas generation. All of this has fallen on deaf ears. Now we are saddled with an abandoned
plant and a new, unwanted and unneeded facility at an exorbitant cost to the Ontario taxpayer for the sole reason of getting the necessary votes to get reelected.
This is nothing less than criminal.
Now we know the true market price of seats in the legislature. I suggest that we strap him on to the blade of one of those windmills he foisted on us and let him go for a ride. As a taxpayer, this fiscal mess makes me sick and his sorry ass should be charged with fraud.
The depths of incompetence and utter mismanagement of Ontario's generating capacity should go down in history as the result of pandering to the naive and misinformed voter. Hopefully this gets hung around the neck of the provincial Libs until long after the 'debt retirement charge' disappears from the power bill.
McGuinty and Smitherman took dynamite to the 2000+ Megawatt Lakeview Generating Station that was already standing on the site in question. Political showmanship at its worst. They've since fumbled the easiest handoff you could receive from, well, yourself. Nanticoke, a 4000 Mw station sits nearly idle from what I've heard, spinning up only when windmills and solar panels fall flat. Those 2 plants alone could once generate a significant portion of the provinces electrical needs when allowed to run as they were designed. I'm sure they would love to demolish Nanticoke Generating Staion as well, but the cold and dark reality is they need it. In the Liberal's world, coal power is only bad when the lights are on.
It would be interesting to see the correlation between the rise in power costs and the decline in manufacturing - printed in crayon - so Liberal voters have a chance of understanding how the 'X' they marked in the voter booth relates to lost jobs and higher bills. Oh, scandals too. How can you forget the scandals.
Dalton, why not run for the national leadership of the Liberal Party. That should bury them for good, I hope!
GM
Unfortunately, otter, I don't think all voters will acknowledge the link. Pointing out where the money for high energy costs has gone, to well connected relatives and business friends, is probably more effective. Windmills are a direct transfer of cash from the middle class to crony class.
In England, for instance, David Cameron's father in law rakes in about $1000 per day from his wind farms. In the US stimulus money was wasted on political allies' green corps. Considering e-health and other scandals, I'll bet the same type of deal happened in Ontario. I have yet to see a government that can successfully separate is business interests from its political and personal interests.
It's time to follow the money. This can't just be a case of complete and total incompetence, this has to be criminal.
How do we get to the bottom of this and make these people accountable?
If this keeps up I'll have to become anne (not from Ontario). Those left will have to do without my generous share of taxes.
That should read EXTORTED taxes.
All I can say is "Atlas Shrugged". Time to watch it all burn
I know some will think this nasty,but I hope(nay,pray)that the jet stream will dip down to just about the southern shore of Lake Erie. Maybe when the leftards of the GTO and Frogreal are burning their chairs for heat during a brown/black out at -30C,they just might smarten up. And no Forces help,PMSH.
Time for some bumper stickers.
Honk if you voted for McGuinty - I want to know where the arseholes are.
Ideology always tops common sense with these fantics. No matter who suffers. Never trust a tax addict. Money junkies would sell thier Children for power.