All about fudging numbers

Ontarians have good idea how gas plant fiasco went down

When Charles Sousa testified before the Standing Committee on Justice Policy last month, one of his inquisitors, Gilles Bisson, said something that could stand as a one-line summation of the Liberal approach to the twin gas-plant cancellations.

“you guys tried to fudge the numbers for political reasons,” the New democratic Party MPP said.

Mr. Sousa, the Ontario finance minister, called the remark inappropriate, and fellow Liberal MPP and committee chairman Shafiq Qaadri took issue “with the quality of the word ‘fudge’ in parliamentary practice,” but Mr. Bisson was wholly accurate.

For all the many dozen witnesses have said before the committee since it began investigating the Oakville and Mississauga cancellations, belatedly, this past winter, and for all that has been uncovered by concurrent probes by the provincial auditor-general and the information and privacy commissioner, what remains is one central fact: when the governing Liberals eventually decided to inform the public of what the gas-plant closures cost, the numbers were lowballed, the full cost obfuscated, the true price shrouded in terminology meant to lessen the blow for a government teetering in a minority position.

The cost of both cancellations was $235-million, they said. It was a right fudging.

And, while the opposition hopes to keep up the pressure by making new disclosure demands in the hope some sort of smoking gun will spill forth, it is plainly obvious none is needed.

We are well beyond knowing that these were shameless political decisions. So, yes, perhaps a hastily deleted email will be recovered that will spell everything out to the letter.

“dear Fellow Senior Member of dalton McGuinty’s Office,” it might say. “It would appear that these decisions to scrap Oakville and Missis- sauga could end up costing in the neighbourhood of $800-million once you factor in all the additional costs related to the new sites. Clearly the prudent move is to only talk about certain costs, leave others out of it, and come in somewhere below a palatable $250-million. deceitfully yours, Liberal McShadypants.”

Such a note could have existed, and maybe still does on a server somewhere, but do we really need to see it to know the scenario it presents is pretty much what happened?

Consider Mr. Bisson’s comment about fudging came during a backand-forth with Mr. Sousa over whether the Liberal cabinet had been made aware of the total costs of the cancellation and relocation of the plants.

Mr. Bisson said documents that had been before the cabinet “made clear [that] in the case of Mississauga, [the cost was] anywhere from $300-million to $400-million to cancel, and in the case of Oakville, it’s between $300-million and $500-million.”

Mr. Sousa responded with what has become the standard government defence on the file: their numbers, which they had insisted were the only true cost, were only for the sunk costs, and specifically the costs to the taxpayer — penalties that would have to be paid to the companies holding the contracts and money that would come out of the treasury in the short term.

The other costs, those the auditor-general and the Ontario Power Authority have since added to the bill to push it to $585-million, with the potential to rise further still when another auditor’s report on Oakville is released, are a result of long-term costs related to, for example, the transmission of power from the new plant locations.

There was no attempt to deceive, the Liberals have said, but they were only dealing with those taxpayer costs, not the additional burden on the electricity system that will be borne by ratepayers (who are also, of course, taxpayers).

The trail of witnesses before the justice committee has made it clear the government knew it was playing a taxpayer-versus-ratepayer game when it came up with the $235-million figure.

It can claim wide-eyed innocence in this regard, but the public would be foolish to buy that notion. Like someone buying a new car, the government effectively negotiated 20-year leases for the power produced at the relocated plants, then told everyone about only the down payment.

Or, as Mr. Bisson put it in his exchange with Mr. Sousa, talking specifically about Oakville, “you guys knew it was over $40-million, and what you were doing was essentially trying to keep the numbers low in order to save your political hides.”

That does seem to be precisely the point. Given the effort members of the former premier’s staff put forth to make sure their communications on the gas-plant file were erased, I doubt we’ll ever see a document that admits that quite so clearly.

But such a document would only confirm what a reasonable person would already conclude to be true.