Cutting costs way better than cutting power bills

The Wynne government’s announcement last week of a reduction in power rates in Ontario is good politics. Too bad it’s lousy government.

Something had to be done to ease power poverty in the province and the rate reduction at least begins to address that problem.

Added to the provincial tax rebate announced earlier, the reduction should total about 25 per cent off most electricity bills in the province by this summer.

But here’s the rub. The change lifts some of the burden from today’s hard-pressed ratepayers and places it on the shoulders of our grandchildren.

The high costs associated with power production — as organized by the Liberal government in the province today — will simply be paid off during a longer period of time.

Many have used the “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” analogy to explain the effects of this rate reduction.

More precisely it’s robbing future generations to pay for serious mistakes made by this government during the past 14 years in office.

Instead of just cutting power bills for consumers, good government would have addressed the underlying causes of the out-of-control rates.

That might have meant introducing legislation to allow the province an escape clause out of high price contracts for wind and solar power.

Or it might have meant a meaningful examination of all the high-priced bureaucrats in all the various government agencies that have their hand in the power cookie jar.

The system would work better, at a lower cost, if a bunch of these positions were eliminated.

There were all kinds of options available to the deep thinkers at Queen’s Park.

But instead of working hard to try to cure the disease, Wynne and crew chose instead to dress it with a flashy bandage that people could confuse with real action. It’s more of the smoke and mirrors for which this government is famous.

Those who are praising the government for this reduction in rates are doing nothing but helping the Liberal re-election plan in the provincial vote to come in June next year.

And that would be a shame for which Ontario’s people would pay and pay and pay for generations, unless the Wynne Liberals have had some kind of epiphany that would lead them to control spending.

Since 2007, the provincial debt has approximately doubled to $308 billion and appears well on the way to a whopping $350 billion.

An incredibly irresponsible record on fiscal issues for any government in the year before an election.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the government got here in part because it refused to listen to anybody outside the inner circle at Queen’s Park.

I’ve listed before all the voices that tried to tell the Grits their Green Energy Act was the roadmap to disaster that it has proven to be.

And they continue not to listen to parents, community leaders and others as they close schools and decimate communities across the province in the service of some illconceived bureaucratic standard.

An immediate moratorium on such closings would be an indication that the Liberals are beginning to understand how much damage they’re doing in the province.

But schools aren’t the only other out-of-control area. There’s a looming disaster in health care with the entire system likely to collapse under the weight of the ever-growing bureaucracy.

Pointing all this out time and again is an exercise in frustration, but there’s always hope someone might pay attention, as unlikely as that seems.