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The tearjerker apology
That was quite the tearjerker speech that Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne gave to a Liberal party meeting in Ottawa last weekend. Ms. Wynne acknowledged “Many people in Ontario are not happy with me right now… I think I sometimes have given them reason to think that… Our government made a mistake. It was my mistake… We are going to find more ways to lower [hydro] rates and reduce the burden on consumers…I have done my level best to address the issues that I see in the province and to implement the plan that I ran on…I recognize that I have not perfectly served the people of Ontario.”
For this confession, Ms. Wynne received a standing ovation. She certainly would have appreciated that a lot more than the booing she received at an Ottawa area plowing match a few weeks ago.
Ms. Wynne seems to like the apology route. After she became premier, she apologized on numerous occasions for the sins of the government of which she was a key member. It did her some good, as voters preferred her leadership over that of the Conservatives under Tim Hudak or the NDP under Andrea Horwath. But even though apologizing is probably more productive than the ‘never apologize, never explain’ approach—of which the current standard bearer is Donald Trump—its lustre wears off quickly. Besides, it shouldn’t shield anyone’s record from public scrutiny.
As for the admission that she had not perfectly served the people of Ontario, she is employing an old trick, the ‘let she who is without sin cast the first stone’ gambit. Nobody asked or expected Ms. Wynne to be perfect. To admit that she is not perfect is to ask to be measured against a standard that would exonerate anyone. There remains this legitimate question: given the facts and resources at her disposal, did she and her government make good decisions; or would some other government, with better judgment or a different ideology, have done it better?
And as for doubling down on her recent pledge to offer hydro rebates—with special offers for rural customers— the premier has surely played the old shell game called ‘bribing the taxpayers with their own money.’ Virtually everyone is a hydro customer, so to offer a rebate to everyone means that the money will have to come from some external source. That external source will, directly or indirectly, be a tax or cost increase on some or all of the same people; a gasoline tax increase, for example, will be a tax on everyone who drives a car. Perhaps Ms. Wynne has identified a constituency that won’t mind subsidizing the rebate. Perhaps she has in mind to follow the example of British Columbia and tax those fashionable whipping boys— foreign investors who buy Ontario real estate and then don’t live in it. Or perhaps she has discovered an alien race that is prepared to subsidize our hydro bills as a small price to pay for the opportunity to colonize planet Earth using Ontario as the launching pad. Or perhaps she is prepared to pass on some of the cost to the nonvoting constituency called ‘future generations,’ in the form of an increase in the public debt.
There is no escaping the fact that the real cost of delivering hydro in Ontario is high. Ms. Wynne has to explain, without flimflam, how it got to be that way and how she plans to reduce it. It was her government to which the auditor general was referring when she stated in December 2015 that Ontario had over the previous eight years paid $37 billion over market for power because it ignored its own electrical power planning process and made decisions at the political level. It was her government that was going to make Ontario a renewable energy powerhouse, only to have the World Trade Organization rule the preference to Ontario manufacturing unlawful. It was her government that wanted so badly to stimulate the introduction of renewable energy that it bypassed local planning procedures and guaranteed the hydro system would purchase renewable energy at huge premiums over market rates. It was her government that chose to overlook the intermittency of renewable power and the inability of the distribution system to store it. And it was her government that announced just a few weeks ago that future renewable energy procurements were being shelved because the demand for power wasn’t there. So there are a number of “mistakes” to address, head on.
Thank you for the tearjerker apology, Ms. Wynne, as far as it goes. I’m sorry if I have reacted a little strongly; I’ve got it off my chest and I feel better already. But if you ask for re-election, skip the rhetorical tricks and be straight with voters. Or in the alternative, tell us more about those space aliens.
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