Alternative needed on electricity file

Slashing the exorbitant pay rates of the most senior hydro executives in Ontario, as Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown promised last week if he wins next year’s election, is a populist and symbolic measure.

We have nothing against populism — which means addressing the concerns of ordinary people — and salaries and benefits in the electricity sector need to be reined in generally speaking, but there aren’t enough hydro executives to reduce hydro rates by long-overdue salary restraint.

In a bid to save the political hide of the Liberals in next year’s election, Premier Kathleen Wynne has announced a 25 per cent average, temporary rebate in hydro rates, starting this summer. But it’s all financed with borrowed money that will end up costing us even more.

Under Wynne’s plan, hydro rates will also be artificially held to the inflation rate for four years, but will inevitably skyrocket later.

Wynne and her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty, helped to create this mess when they blundered into unreliable, unnecessary, expensive wind and solar power, which had nothing to do with eliminating Ontario’s reliance on coal-fired electricity. They did that with nuclear power and natural gas, meaning the billions of public dollars they have spent on wind and solar power were an unnecessary waste of public money.

That said, to defeat the Wynne government in the next election, voters will have to be convinced Brown has a better plan. Brown needs to explain what that plan is. The PC leader, who opposes Wynne’s almost $2-billion-a-year cap-and-trade carbon price cash grab, says he will introduce a revenue-neutral carbon pricing plan, fair to all Ontarians. If so, the public needs to hear what it is and how it will work, sooner rather than later.

It’s vitally important in the next election that voters have a clear idea of where the parties stand on the electricity file, which impacts everyone in the province financially.

This as opposed to the last election where Wynne not only said nothing about introducing a cap and trade scheme, but added she had no plans to introduce a carbon tax shortly after the election. (Disingenuous because cap and trade is a carbon tax by another name.)

Finally, taunts by the Liberals that the Tories have no electricity plan of their own are specious, given the shockingly reckless and irresponsible way they’ve handled this file since taking power in 2003.

But Ontarians need a responsible alternative. If Brown and the PCs want to win, they need to provide one.