Only some hydro polls matter to government
Hey, remember the Hydro One sale?
It’s kind of fallen off the radar these days with all the hubbub over electricity rates, but this was the incredibly controversial decision by Premier Kathleen Wynne to effectively privatize the province’s transmission utility, gradually selling 60 per cent of it.
(For those of you keeping score at home of controversial Ontario Liberal electricity decisions, this one comes after the Green Energy Act and the gas plants cancellation, but before the refinancing of the global adjustment.)
We always knew the government’s handling of the electricity file has been unpopular, but The Canadian Press has gotten its hands on years of internal government polling that show how bad the damage has been.
As far back as December 2013, 70 per cent of Ontarians said the government was on the wrong track with electricity prices. On Hydro One it was even worse: a 2014 poll found just 25 per cent of the public supported selling it. These numbers have barely moved since then.
It raises some interesting questions about how Wynne’s government makes decisions in the face of bad poll numbers. In particular, why was the government willing to go forward with its Hydro One sell-off, but capitulated on electricity prices?
It’s worth remembering why Hydro One was put on the auction block. The government wanted money to build infrastructure, but borrowing all of it was out of the question given the province’s massive debt load.
To get the cash, it essentially chose selling Hydro One shares over raising taxes (or a pseudo-tax, such as highway tolls). That’s part of it right there: privatizing Hydro One was likely an easier sell than a tax raise.
But I think there’s a bigger factor at play as well.
If any party was going to benefit from the Hydro One privatization, it should have been the NDP. The Progressive Conservatives have gamely pretended they passionately oppose the Hydro One sale, but any voter motivated about protecting Crown assets would be bonkers to shift their vote to the PCs, who tried to sell off Hydro One the last time they formed government.
But the NDP have gotten zero traction from this. Their vote share hasn’t moved in five byelections, and polls consistently show them in third place or barely in second.
When someone is asked if they support selling Hydro One, they’re likely to say no. But do they really care enough to change their vote? If you picked 100 people in a shopping mall, how many could tell you what Hydro One even does?
When Wynne decided to sell a chunk of Hydro One — which remains the single boldest decision she’s made since the election — she gambled that it wouldn’t be a ballot box issue for voters. And I think she was right.
She holds it up now as an example of courage in leadership. During Tuesday’s question period, PC Leader Patrick Brown demanded to know why she ignored the internal polls on Hydro One. “If the leader of the Opposition is saying to me, ‘Premier, why don’t you just govern according to the polls?’, I think that gives us an insight into the political methodology that he ascribes to,” Wynne responded.
But let’s not get carried away with Wynne’s bravery. On electricity prices, she didn’t just provide relief to the rural residents, who really needed it; she brought in expensive acrossthe-board rate cuts that we’ll still be paying off decades down the road.
The key difference, of course, is that people were ready to change their votes on this issue. After losing the Scarborough byelection last summer, Wynne explicitly blamed hydro rates; we see now that the internal polling data was making that clear. She may not govern according to every poll, but when a poll matters to her election chances, the government moves with determination.