At the Rubicon

Bad policy gives off a foul odour. The longer it is allowed to fester and decay, the worse it smells. The putrid stench lures vultures and scavengers—those who would profit from the misfortune of others.

Nearly a decade after he was first elected as Premier Dalton McGuinty is increasingly being boxed in by bad financial and energy policies of his own making. The pungent aroma of his decaying government is getting harder to mask.

This morning, Ontario government debt is about $266 billion (a full $100 billion more than McGuinty started with in 2003)—and just slightly greater than that of Portugal’s at $262 billion. Portugal has slightly fewer citizens than Ontario and more constrained economic output, and therefore more of its earnings must be used to keep creditors away from the door. But Ontario residents would be mistaken to take comfort from this distinction. Portugal no longer makes its own fiscal decisions, every move its government makes must first get the nod of the bankers and bureaucrats beyond its borders as it awaits a bailout package.

Ontario’s economic output is declining and, with it, the ability to pay our debts. This province is only a few bad output reports and a hike in interest rates away from smelling like Portugal. Worse, the trend is going the wrong way.

This is why the Premier is locked in a fight with the province’s teachers. He knows he must carve out financial concessions, and soon. He will wage the same battle with doctors and nurses—not for competitive reasons, but rather because he let Ontario’s finances slip away from him and has few other choices left.

The Premier has become a desperate man. But not so desperate as to disengage from perhaps his most damaging policy—his reckless and misguided rush into renewable energy. McGuinty continues to lavish billions of taxpayer dollars on developers and opportunistic financiers in the vain ambition that he will be remembered as the man who battled through opposition at every turn to plant wind turbines and acres of solar panels across the province.

It never mattered to him that the policy was fundamentally flawed; that it wouldn’t deliver meaningful energy and was so outrageously expensive it would drive up household electricity bills many fold and push industry out of the province. Dalton McGuinty was always convinced he knew best. So he pushes on. Heedlessly. Stubbornly. Recklessly.

South Marysburgh could be his Rubicon. Julius Caesar knew that if he pushed past the Rubicon River—there was no turning back.

If Dalton McGuinty gives the green light to developers to erect 40-storey turbines on Crown land at Ostrander Point, or at the gates of one of this province’s most important nature preserves, he knows he will be unleashing a torrent of wrath and criticism upon his government.

For it isn’t just neighbouring landowners who will be damaged by his misguided energy policy. Endangered species will be uprooted, nature groups will coalesce against his government and those who have been sickened by the declining bird populations on nearby Wolfe Island will be forced to watch in horror as the annual migration heads across Lake Ontario into the wall of swirling blades. Those who understood that Crown land was meant to be cherished, protected and preserved from industrial development will rise up to defend this precious resource.

Like Caesar pausing at the Rubicon River, McGuinty must know that if he ploughs through all the opponents and arguments arrayed against him in South Marysburgh—he will be guided solely by his own arrogance.

He has already laid waste to Ontario environmental regulatory protections, created his own laws to impose his will upon unwilling communities, and has borrowed billions of dollars we don’t have to achieve his ambition. That he has nothing to show for his hubris—only drives him harder.

He will have defeated endangered species, environmentalists and nature in the name of green electricity. That it is useless electricity matters not all. Legacy is all that matters to Dalton McGuinty now.

So when you see or hear the cars filing past the high school and through the streets of Picton protesting the industrial wind factory planned for South Marysburgh on Thursday evening, remember that those folks are the last line of defence against a provincial government that long ago appeared to stop caring what this community or any other rural Ontario community thinks.

If McGuinty pushes through his will in South Marysburgh—no place in Ontario is safe from the rot of his government’s destructive policies.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca