AUDITOR GENERAL TEARS ANOTHER STRIP OFF WYNNE

CHRISTMAS COMES EARLY AND often to the handful of beneficiaries of Kathleen Wynne’s hydro giveaway. Ripped off consumers can expect nothing but a lump of coal, however.

Scratch that – coal is persona non grata in Wynne’s Ontario, so your stocking will be filled with the product of a wind turbine or solar panel: hot air.

Among the many shortcomings of Wynne’s government identified last week by Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk is some $260 million in ineligible expenses claimed by power plants, adding to the burden of Ontario’s expensive electricity system. Much of the blame for rising rates falls to mismanagement, including the government’s selloff of a valuable public resource in the name of Wynne’s reelection scheme.

More than $80 million of the ineligible claims remains unpaid, with the government making no effort to do right by consumers – there appears to be no Christmas miracle forthcoming, with Ontarians having to wait until the spring to send Wynne a charge of their own.

Lysyk’s report is a condemnation of much of Wynne’s energy program, particularly the poor management and lack of oversight of something called the Standby Cost Recovery Program, which appears to be something of a slush fund. It’s from there that the $260 million in suspect costs came, representing some 40 per cent of submissions from power plants under the program.

Her report notes that generators claimed thousands of dollars annually for staff car washes, carpet cleaning, road repairs, landscaping, scuba gear and raccoon traps. One generator claimed some $175,000 for coveralls and parkas at one facility over a two-year period, for instance. None of the expenses had anything to do with running power equipment on standby, Lysyk notes.

Opposition parties at Queen’s Park are calling for a deeper review, including a police investigation.

Adding the fiscal mismanagement charges, now legion, is the revelation that not only did Wynne fail to ignore repeated warnings about suspect payouts, her government rewarded poor oversight. Ontario Power Generation’s Tom Mitchell led the charge on the sunshine list while CEO from 2009 to 2015, but also in 2016 when he was given a $563,000 bonus a year after retiring.

The report notes that the Independent Electricity System Operator has not implemented some important recommendations made by the Ontario Energy Board’ over the last 15 years that could have saved Ontarians millions of dollars.

The electricity file is only one damning component of the auditor’s report, which chronicles mismanagement that extends from health care and emergency planning to the provincial real estate portfolio and crop insurance.

As has been the case with past reports, the auditor finds the government continues to spend taxpayers’ money attempting to convince taxpayers what a good job it’s doing – last year it spent $58 million on advertising, about a third of which was on ads “to make the government look good.”

Perhaps most notable, Lysyk reiterated the findings in a special report from earlier this year when she called into question the very accounting model used by the government. “Incorrect accounting treatments” have been used to make it appear Wynne had balanced the books, concealing actual deficits and a ballooning debt.

In some circles, that would be called fraud.