Unplug Dalton McGuinty

I have watched in horror as Dalton McGuinty and his buddies at Queens Park have mismanaged the Ontario economy over the past few years, but I must say that I am astounded at the level of incompetence they display when it comes to the "Green Energy Plan".

For any government to come up with a plan for something as critical as the longterm supply of energy to a province you would expect that the politicians involved would seek input and counsel from real experts throughout the industry and would likely not start the wind down of existing technologies and sources of supply until the plan had been fully developed and the proposed strategy evaluated and understood. In the case of Mr. McGuinty and his team, this was obviously not considered necessary given their superior understanding of all issues when it comes to knowing what is best for Ontarians.

As such, we are now faced with a half baked and I'll conceived energy plan that is already coming apart at the seams before it is fully committed to paper for publication. To say the plan is flawed is a gross understatement as it is likely that if it is fully enacted the only reason that Ontario will produce less polluting gasses in the future will be because most industry (that is not a beneficiary of the taxpayer funded subsidies within this plan) will be leaving the province to setup in more business friendly areas.

This plan has already been shown by their own admission to have us on a path to a 46% increase in energy costs within 5 years and in answer to this astoundingly bad news the political geniuses at the Ontario Liberal party come up with a rebate program to offer a 10% cut in our costs over the same period. The problem with this is that firstly the government has run up such a large deficit since taking office that it will need to borrow the money in order to give us the rebate which means that we will all then be left to deal with the cost of that borrowing (estimated at $6Bn) in future years and no doubt by way of higher taxes. Secondly, this "rebate" doesn't even offset the looming increases anyway and even if it did, it would not change the fact that the higher costs are real and simply being deferred to a future date!

The real issue is that Mr. McGuinty is signing our children up for so called green energy without any evidence that it is actually any greener or even as green than other options that are already proven. And not satisfied with the lack of evidence that this is the right technology he has done deals with the special interest lobbyists that represent the wind and solar power industries to offer rates for the power produced that are ridiculously high and will handicap the growth of business in Ontario for decades.

Now faced with opposition to these bad deals and bad policy and facing an upcoming election in the next year our politicians and the lobby groups are embarking on a campaign of misinformation and deception aimed at confusing the public into believing that these artificial subsidies and these inefficient technologies are actually needed for the greater good and will in time create new high tech jobs in the province. So worried are the lobbyists close to the government such as CANWEA that a PR company has been recruited and is using an innocent sounding name of SUSSEX group to put together plans between eco action groups, government and the wind and solar industries to in their own words " create confusion about the facts" over the next 12 months. They do this solely to protect their own interests in ensuring that government continues to subsidize these programs.