Who’s sorry now?

There is a rethink happening in smart chattering circles in these last days of the provincial election campaign. Kathleen Wynne is, according to this fresh pondering, being judged too harshly, perhaps irrationally by voters in this province. And thus the #sorrynotsorry narrative that has emerged in the dying days of this campaign. She is sorry people don’t like her, but not sorry for her accomplishments.

Set aside the fact that her list of achievements is self-defined and lacks critical context, all political candidates strive to cast their track record in the best possible light.

Instead, I invite readers to ride along with me across the Glenora Ferry. It is a pretty waterside drive. Twenty kilometres beyond the crossing, the tip of Cressy projects the County eastward just across the reach. On your left is the Lennox and Addington power plant. It burns both gas and oil to generate electricity. The plant can power two million homes. It never does. It sits idle almost all of the time. Yet it costs Ontario Power Generation, and therefore you and me, more than $7 million dollars to operate each month. The fact is that there is simply no need for the electricity it is capable of producing.

“It is really the wrong plant in the wrong location,” said Jan Carr, former chief executive of the Ontario Power Authority, to the Star in 2014 explaining why the plant runs at less than two per cent of its yearly capacity. “Always has been.”

Continuing past this facility for few a few hundred metres, you will be impressed by a massive new plant emerging from the earth and soaring into the sky. It is, bewilderingly, another brand new gas-powered electricity generating station. $1.2 billion to build. It is not known yet how much we will spend each month to maintain another idle plant. It is targetted to begin generating unneeded electricity later this year. Theoretically, it will have the capacity to power another million homes. Anticipating, perhaps, a Napanee building boom?

Remember too that this plant was originally supposed to be built in Oakville, where electricity is needed, but diverted to Napanee because then-Liberal-premier Dalton McGuinty feared opposition to the plant would cost him a muchneeded seat in the 2010 election. It was crass, calculated politics. The kind that you and your children will bear the cost—for a long, long time.

Once you have soaked in this strange vista, I invite you to turn your gaze to the right, just a little further down the road, across the channel to Amherst Island. There, arising from the once-pastoral isle—just 20 kilometres long and seven kilometres at its widest—you will be struck by the forest of 50-storey high industrial wind turbines dwarfing every other natural or manmade feature on this patch of farmland.

Wind power is intermittent and thus uncontrollable. As such it can’t be counted on to keep the lights on or your home heated. But with three-million-homes worth of electricity generating capacity sitting idle next door, it is plainly obvious that the piddling amount of electricity it will spit into the grid isn’t needed. And likely won’t ever be needed—throughout the lucrative 20-year contract the Ontario government lavished upon Algonquin Power— over the heartbroken objections of residents forced live with these pointless machines whirring and humming overhead.

Kathleen Wynne said she would end these wasteful ventures. Yes, it would have cost the taxpayers to back out of these terrible deals— but nothing close to the amount of money we will spend building useless plants nor the amount we will continue to spend keeping them on standby, for the day they are needed. A day that is unlikely to arrive during the working life of these new plants.

Now, let’s get back in the car and head over to Belleville. We will pull up on Dundas Street at the foot of Coleman Street to consider the courthouse. It is a fine building. And unlike everything we’ve seen so far on this journey— it is actually used. We might debate whether it was needed—but that’s quibbling.

What you need to know is that this courthouse is the result of a partnership—and I use this term in the loosest of ways—between the province and corporate developers and investors. The partnership consists of the province paying corporate investors approximately $300 million over 30 years, for a building worth about $90 million to construct, plus three decades of operating costs. In year 31 the province will get the deed back (and all liabilities and maintenance requirements) of the then-30- year-old building.

It is a crazy expensive way to fund infrastructure. Worse it doesn’t show up in Ontario’s staggering mound of debt—the largest amount of debt racked up by a state, province or canton in the world. That is truly a remarkable feat.

Multiply these wasteful examples by every other community in the province. The Belleville Courthouse was completed the year Kathleen Wynne took office, so it’s not on her. Yet dozens of other provincial buildings and infrastructure projects using the same financing scheme have been approved on her watch, including courthouses in Halton and a magnificent new judicial palace in Toronto.

Piecing these together, one begins to see the outlines of the tangled fiasco the Liberals—under both McGuinty and Wynne—have rendered Ontario’s finances. It is a message hammered home again and again by the province’s Auditor General and in the Drummond Report.

It is a legacy that will continue to hobble the province’s choices throughout our children’s lives.

Kathleen Wynne told this newspaper in 2012, when running to lead her party, that she understood the hardship her party had caused rural communities. She said she understood the toll the Green Energy Act had taken on residents, local government and endangered species. She vowed to fix it. All of it. Voters gave her four years.

Next week they will render their verdict. Sorry.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca