Liberals Finally Out

It won’t be long before the Ontario Liberals start blaming the Progressive Conservatives for the financial mess they’ve left us in after 15 years in power.
You can already see it happening in some smug media commentary, gleefully predicting Premier-designate Doug Ford and the PCs are going to be a disaster.

In reality, outgoing premier Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals are the disaster — and they have created massive fiscal problems that will take decades, if ever, to correct.
Today, let’s examine the biggest financial train wreck the Liberals have left us to address — the skyrocketing cost of electricity due to the idiotic way they blundered into green energy.

According to a report by Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office, the per-unit cost of solar power to Ontario ratepayers as the Liberals leave office is a staggering $480 per megawatt hour (MWh), wind $173/MWh, biofuels $131/MWh.That compares to $69/MWh for nuclear power and $58/MWh for hydro.(Hat tip to Jeffrey Simpson for referencing these numbers in a recent Globe and Mail column.)

The Liberals saddled us with these outrageous costs for green energy despite repeated warnings from two auditors general, starting just two years after they passed the Green Energy Act in 2009.From 2011 on, the Liberals were repeatedly told that by ignoring the advice of their own energy experts, they were forcing hydro residential and business ratepayers into paying billions of dollars more for renewable energy than was needed to reach the Liberals’ green energy target.

Combined with other Liberal electricity blunders documented by Lysyk (such as the gas plants scandal, doubling smart meter costs, turning Hydro One into one of Canada’s least reliable large electricity distributors) the impact on hydro prices was devastating. They soared to the highest in Canada.Between 2008 and 2016, average residential electricity costs increased by 71% in Ontario compared to 34% across Canada, according to Lakehead University economics professor Livio Di Matteo in a recent report for the Fraser Institute.

In 2016, Toronto residents were paying $720 annually more for electricity than the average Canadian.Between 2010 and 2016, electricity costs for large industrial users in Toronto increased 53% and in Ottawa 43%, compared to a Canadian average of 14%.
That led to the loss of 75,000 manufacturing jobs between 2008 and 2015 alone.
The Liberals who created this mess, for which we’ll be paying for decades to come.