Hydro sticker shock due to Grit mismanagement

As a new, shocking Fraser Institute report on electricity pricing in Ontario reveals, real people suffer when governments are incompetent.

The governments in this case are the Liberal ones headed first by Dalton McGuinty and now by Kathleen Wynne, who have turned Ontario’s energy sector into a financial train wreck from which there will be no easy or painless escape for generations to come.

The numbers in the Fraser study, titled Evaluating Electricity Price

Growth, are damning. Torontonians today pay $720 more annually for electricity than the average Canadian. Residents of Ottawa paid $492 more a year.

Ontario electricity prices skyrocketed 71 per cent between 2008 and 2016.

That’s more than double the Canadian average of 34 per cent, 2.5 times more than the rise in household incomes, four times the inflation rate, and 4.5 times the growth rate of the economy.

In 2015-16 alone, Ontario electricity prices increased 15 per cent, 2.5 times the national average of six per cent.

This is what’s plunged hundreds of thousands of Ontarians into energy poverty, left seniors torn between eating and paying their hydro bills, and driven hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs out of Ontario.

The Fraser study says Ontario’s runaway hydro prices are directly linked to the government’s phaseout of coal energy without doing its due diligence, poorly structured long-term renewable energy contracts, and other policy choices.

“The Ontario government and its energy policy decisions share a lot of blame for the current crisis in electricity prices,” said study co-author Kenneth Green.

This is the price we all pay when, as former auditor general Jim McCarter reported in 2011 regarding the Liberals’ multibillion-dollar green energy deal with Korea’s Samsung corporation, “no economic analysis or business case was done to determine whether the agreement . . . was economically prudent and costeffective.”

In the same report, McCarter wrote, “we did not rely on the (energy) ministry’s internal audit service team to reduce the extent of our audit work because it had not recently conducted any audit work on renewable energy initiatives.”

Ask yourself. How is that even possible? How irresponsible is that?

And yet time after time, the auditor general would come to the same conclusion regarding the Liberals’ green energy initiatives.

For example when McCarter’s successor, Bonnie Lysyk, found in 2014 that the Liberals failed to do a cost benefit analysis or develop a business plan when they introduced smart meters, thus going almost $1 billion over budget.

That was also true for their cancelled gas plants fiasco, costing more than a billion.

True for the 20-year, wildly overpriced feed-in-tariff (FIT) contracts the Liberals signed with green energy developers.

True when the Liberals ignored the advice of their own experts on green energy pricing, costing $9.2 billion.

Blunder after blunder. That’s the record of the Liberals on green energy, which was never needed to replace coal-fired electricity as the Liberals claim. That was done with nuclear power and natural gas.

And what’s the Liberals’ answer to this fiscal disaster they have inflicted on Ontarians?

It’s to borrow up to $93 billion more to pay for $24 billion in hydro rate relief for four years, a temporary 25 per cent discount, after which rates will explode as never before.

Basically, we’re being led by a government that is both incompetent and reckless.

It’s as simple, and as scary, as that.