Unusually tiny boondoggle

In very few scenarios would $ 20 million be considered a “small price to pay” for a plan that never actually came to fruition, but conventional rules don’t apply in Ontario.

This is a province where energy is produced in excess and sold to other jurisdictions at a loss, while its residents swallow increased Hydro rates; where Pan Am Games’ executives who steered the event $ 342 million over budget were compensated with hefty bonuses for a job well done; where a specific promise that is not achieved by the government’s own deadline is dismissed as a “stretch goal”; where the party under investigation for deleting emails pertaining to a billion- dollar gas plan boondoggle was rewarded with a majority government during the last provincial election.

The way to make sense of Ontario, then, is to understand that nothing really makes much sense, and what you or I might call “a grotesque waste of taxpayer dollars” can be shrugged off by the Ontario government as just another “investment” in our province’s future.

Ontario’s $20-million “investment” in its recently departed pension plan, therefore, is nothing to get worked up about, according to Premier Kathleen Wynne, who credits her government with helping to see to the enhanced Canada Pension Plan, which was announced by the federal government last week. “Quite frankly, I was a thorn in the side of many of my colleagues,” Wynne said during the press conference in which she finally laid her Ontario Retirement Pension Plan ( ORPP) to rest. “I kept bringing this up. I kept making it clear that we were moving ahead, and I kept making it clear that we all knew that there was a national problem.”

The implication, thus, is had the Liberal government not charged ahead with its ill- conceived pension plan, Canadians would still be headed toward a retirement crisis that experts still aren’t convinced exists, and may or may not be remedied by this enhancement to Canada’s federal pension plan. According to Wynne, Ontario simply had to spend that $20 million on research, administration and advertising, or else the federal government would still

ACCORDING TO WYNNE, ONTARIO SIMPLY HAD TO SPEND THAT $20 MILLION. — URBACK FOR ONTARIO’S LIBERALS, BLOWING $20 MILLION ON NOTHING IS ACTUALLY A KIND OF PROGRESS.

be twiddling its thumbs on CPP reform — all while middle- class Canadians ineptly continued trying to manage their own money. How could it let that happen?

Ontarians are now left to reconcile complicated, contradictory feelings that celebrate the death of a terrible pension plan and lament another situation wherein the government spent tens of millions of dollars on nothing. And try as we might, it’s hard to get too upset: indeed, while $20 million certainly isn’t nothing, in the alternate universe of Ontario, where net- zero contract negotiations with teachers end up costing $ 300 million, a busted smart meter program costs the government $ 2 billion, and the MaRS office tower in downtown Toronto needs a government bailout of $ 300 million, plus construction costs, this actually is almost a form of progress. Sure, we’d like to care about $20 million spent on nothing, but it’s basically the equivalent of the change found between the couch cushions when we’re talking about Ontario Liberal scandals.

It’s also hard to get too upset about $ 20 million when one considers the alternative: an entirely new pension plan brought to you by the people who brought you the green energy policy disaster (but the ORPP would have been better managed — Wynne promised), to be used in part as a slush fund for the government’s infrastructure ambitions. By the Liberals’ own admission, the money Ontarians would have been forced to contribute would have gone to “new pools of capital ... for Ontario-based projects such as building roads, bridges and new transit,” as well as back to them in their retirement years, just as long as everything went according to plan. And isn’t “according to plan” this administration’s modus operandi?

So when faced with the alternative, $ 20 million actually doesn’t seem that bad. Sure, Ontario now has about 50 ORPP staffers waiting in limbo to see what the federal government will make of the CPP by its July 15 deadline, as well a new ORPP cabinet minister now without a file, but who will still remain in cabinet doing … something, according to Premier Wynne. But now, the government is free to dream up some other cumbersome, complicated, largely unnecessary plan — possibly one to be later used to threaten the federal government into some sort of new action. Surely that’s worth $20 million, right?