By Ray Rivers

May 16th, 2018

BURLINGTON, ON

The Liberals were trailing in third place so their chances of recovering were pretty remote anyway. And now the part time directors of the board of Hydro One have announced that they’ll be treating themselves to an extra $25,000 raise – on top of their $160,000 casual pay. And their timing is impeccable, doing this mid-way through the provincial election campaign. Didn’t the Premier hand pick the Board? Et Tu Brute?

Do the board members have a secret wish to help Doug Ford’s campaign, the man who has promised to fire them as soon as he wins the election? Do these directors just want to say thanks by kicking Kathleen Wynne where it hurts, as her reward for appointing them to such lucrative positions? Or are they just plain suicidal?

Fighting for the team – which appears to include the Hydro One directors?

And for poor Kathleen, this effectively brings an end to any hope she and her Liberals had of winning the Election June 7th. Damned electricity file! It was that file, after all, which helped the Liberals oust the hapless Ernie Eves. And that same file subsequently took out Dalton McGuinty when he got caught playing politics with gas plants. And now it’s Wynne’s turn.

This greedy decision by the Board to increase the size of the trough they wallow in can only become the icing on the cake for Ms. Wynne’s retirement party. The irony is that privatization has made Hydro One more of a political football than it was in its old life as a crown corporation. And that takes us back to the Harris’ decision to break up Ontario Hydro in the first place and McGuinty’s decision to try to make it work rather than unscramble the messy omelette.

Clitheroe getting a reported $25,000 per month pension – a very generous pension settlement when they fired her.)

So while Mr. Ford is making much of this Hydro One malady he would do well to recall that the situation today is a consequence of his own PC party’s misadventure. He would no doubt like us to forget that his party established the original Hydro One board structure. And he’ll never mention its first CEO, Eleanor Clitheroe, Ontario’s truly strange ‘two million dollar woman’ who extracted a very generous pension settlement ($25,000 per month) when she also had to be fired. Little wonder our hydro rates are so high.

The PC’s under Harris/Eves had always intended to privatize Hydro One, and even today Ford will not commit to taking back control of the corporation. He just wants to fire the Board and replace it with his own cronies. What are the chances we can expect to see this scenario replay itself were Ford to become Premier.

And just when it seems nothing could be worse news for our embattled premier, the provincial Financial Accounting Office (FAO) has just come in with an assessment. They claim that the province’s overall debt would be lower if the Wynne government had simply borrowed money for new infrastructure rather than selling off 53% of Hydro One – the nominal rationale for the sale.

Hydro has been always been a problem file.

It’s a bit of a mess, but then Hydro has been always been a problem file, running up over $40 billion in debt going back to the Robarts and Davis years. Of course Hydro really lost it’s way during the Bob Rae period when Maurice Strong thought to change it’s main purpose to delivery of environmental policy. Mike Harris was determined to break it up only to discover the $40 billion gap between its assets and liabilities. But we’ve finally paid off the tab.

McGuinty believed in Harris’ dream and was convinced that he could replace coal with renewable energy by harnessing the economics of the private sector. Rather than go into debt to finance the conversion from dirty coal he issued contracts to independent energy generators, giving them long term contracts guaranteeing purchases of electricity in exchange for them investing their own private capital.

Is blowing smoke when he says he’ll tear up the contracts?

Ford is blowing smoke when he says he’ll tear up the contracts. But even if he could, how would he keep the lights on when the private sector contractors shut down? Would Ontario end up having to buy its energy, including from dirty coal, from its neighbours, while our industry sits idle. Or would he nationalize all energy production?

Speaking of socialism it turns out that one of these Hydro One board members is a former NDP MPP and member of Bob Rae’s Cabinet, Francis Lankin. In addition to filling her face at board meetings she is also double dipping as one of those Trudeau appointed independent senators in Ottawa. It seems even socialists will hop on the gravy train if it avails itself, to borrow a term from Mr. Ford’s late brother.

And the NDP’s Andrea Horwath has promised to buy back and de-privatize Hydro One. This is something which may prove costly, but necessary, as Ontario tries to move beyond its jaded experience of private sector delivery of electricity. But Horwath too needs to be careful as she treads among the ever fragrant meadow muffins on this file.

Ray Rivers writes regularly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking.  Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington.  He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject.     Tweet @rayzrivers

Background links:

Hydro One Pay –   Liberal Response –    Financial Accounting Office –

Hydro One –   Hydro One Board –

By Ray Rivers

May 11th, 2018

BURLINGTON, ON

“I guess we’ve come to expect that everything about Ford is fake,” she said. “The stories are fake, his facts are fake and now we know his supporters are fake.” (Deb Matthews – Liberal campaign co-chair)

Matthews was commenting on reports that Doug Ford’s team had hired actors to sit in the audience and cheer for him at the City TV leaders’ debate earlier this week, the first such head-to-head of the campaign.

The actors

Though, rather than actors, what the event really needed was a director to bring order to the chaotic muddle the TV station had the nerve to call a debate. For one thing the leaders were forced to stand for the entire time, looking awkward and uncomfortable and…sad. It was absolutely the worst format for a debate. In that formation the loudest and most persistent eventually overcomes the others – as if that kind of behaviour is what we most desire in a premier.

Horwath and Ford mostly talked in general platitudes and Wynne kept getting into the weeds – an occupational hazard when one actually understands the files. The leaders were then scored for their performance by instant phone-in polls, which no doubt were also populated by another lot of actors from each of the three parties. And what with the street interviews and backgrounders and endless number of moderators, it was a bun fight to behold.

Ford is the clear front runner in the polls, which has nothing to do with his policies or even his qualifications for the job. His alternate facts on the state of the economy and unemployed are just plain inaccurate – lies, or worse, ignorance. And his rationale for another tax cut makes absolutely no sense given a recent report by the OECD indicating that Canadians actually pay lower taxes than Americans.

PC Leader Doug Ford faced a barrage of questions from Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath in Monday’s CityNews debate in Toronto.

Ford has locked onto a couple of wedge issues which are working for him, such as the outrageous salary paid to the chair of Hydro One – “the six million dollar man”. But Ford’s unproven allegations about the Liberals rewarding their friends and unfounded claims of corruption are unworthy of someone wanting to be Premier. This kind of politicking will only reinforce the comparison Kathleen Wynne is trying to make between Doug Ford and Donald Trump.

Ford has also accused the Liberals of cooking the books, and has found an ally in Ontario’s overzealous auditor general (AG). Her’s is a complicated, arcane argument, that the surplus money the province holds in pension assets should not be counted in order to make the budget appear balanced. Her position is untenable, however, given that she and previous AG’s had accepted that way of accounting in the past. And it begs the question of whether she would still feel that way if the pension account were in deficit, thus creating a provincial deficit.

Doug Ford

But Ford is on solid ground attacking the size of Ontario’s growing debt, particularly as the latest provincial budget just serves to increase the debt. Of course his piety on this matter is compromised, actually shot to hell, when he acknowledges that his promises will also increase the provincial debt. In fact his promises ring in around $16 billion, more than either of the other two. Added to that, Ford’s proposed cancelation of Ontario’s cap and trade carbon tax would add another $2 billion or so in lost revenue.

Ford might have more credibility were he equipped with a fully costed campaign plan. He could always fall back on the one his party had approved last November, when Patrick Brown was still leader. Instead, we find him just alluding to the billions he plans to throw into the very areas where he also plans to make undisclosed ‘efficiency’ cuts of some 4% (~ $6 billion) from the budget.

Presumably one can always find efficiencies in a budget the size of Ontario’s. Yet as Wynne tried to point out before being drowned out – actually talked over – by the other candidates, Ontario’s government has the lowest per capita cost of any in Canada. That would make Ontario already the most efficient in the country. And does anyone believe Ford’s claim to be able to cut costs without eliminating jobs and laying off the civil servants whose programs get axed.

Andrea Horwath

NDP leader Horwath gave the warmest and most sincere TV performance, but she failed to make any clear winning points, leaving the question of how she differs from the current premier up in the air. That shortcoming was partly a casualty of the format, in which policy questions were allocated a mere 45 seconds.

The Premier was even more challenged trying to sum up 15 years in a 45 second commercial sound bite. And after 15 years in office people need to understand the rationale for policies like renewable energy, cap and trade carbon taxes, the Green Belt, measures taken to help lower housing prices across the GTA and so much more.

If Wynne loses this election, which looks inevitable at this point, it will be less about what she and her party have done than her failure to explain it. Wynne is clearly the most intellectual of the leaders. Yet egg heads tend to get caught up in the details and miss the big picture. Populists resonate better with the public. And in the war of style over substance, style usually wins.

Kathleen Wynne

There will be more opportunities for debate among these pretenders to the throne, hopefully in a more traditional debate format. That would give Andrea Horwath more opportunity to explain the math and strategies behind her campaign policies. It would allow Mr. Ford to become more confident in front of the cameras and to get a handle on the files he needs to better understand in order to win a debate, let alone govern the province. And it would offer Kathleen Wynne more time to better account for her party’s record and why.

Ray Rivers writes regularly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking.  Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington.  He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject.     Tweet @rayzrivers

Background links:

Ford’s Actors –    Lower Taxes in Canada –    Coyne on Ford –     McParland on Ford –