Instead of a promised $40 million bill to cancel the Oakville generating site, we’re now told the true cost exceeds $310 million. In place of a projected $180 million to relocate a Mississauga gas-fired plant, it could cost us $275 million.
But the rapid doubling of costs isn’t the half of it. While the big numbers are hard to bear, it’s the bald truth that really hurts:
The truly daunting news this week is that the costs were never knowable.
Not then and not even now. No one knew how much in 2010 when the Oakville site was aborted. No one knew in 2011 when the Mississauga plant was unplugged.
Today, not even the best experts can agree on the implicit, imputed, computed and economic opportunity costs of scrubbing two power plants. A ballpark estimate, based on the ever-changing expert testimony, is that we wasted at least $585 million on relocating them out of the GTA into more malleable communities.
The conventional narrative from the Tories is that the Liberal government is guilty of “corruption” in this “scandal.” The Liberals accuse the opposition of “hypocrisy” for demanding the plants be cancelled and then complaining about the costs.
In this circular debate, it is easy to lose sight of the forest for the (gas) plants. But I have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us.
NIMBYism trumps cynicism as the most explosive and expensive political force of our time.
These plants should never have been cancelled. Yet politicians from all parties played into the hands of classic NIMBY forces in a pre-election environment. And no one — not Dalton McGuinty, not Tory Leader Tim Hudak, nor the NDP’s Andrea Horwath had a clue how costly their shared promises could be.
I’ve written a few times that the Liberals were guilty of making a crass and craven political calculation when they cancelled the Mississauga plant in mid-campaign and mid-construction — without doing any due diligence — in a desperate bid to save seats before the Oct. 6, 2011 election. The auditor general has concluded that their haste caused huge waste because the government lost any leverage to wriggle out of a binding contract.
This week, however, we learned from the arm’s-length Ontario Power Authority that the 2010 cancellation of the Oakville plant was far more costly — even though it was announced in a more orderly way, a year before the election, well before construction had even started.
Why? Thanks to Liberal privatization policies, the government was locked into a binding contract with a firm that demanded compensation for future lost profits. Also, it’s far more expensive to relocate the plant to Eastern Ontario, further from the wholesale supply of natural gas in Sarnia and end-users in the GTA.
The lesson: whether politicians cancel a contract before or after construction — or a campaign — starts, the public still pays a steep price (even more if it’s a private firm). If we don’t learn from our mistakes, we are condemned to keep repeating them. And relocating.
Are the Liberals “corrupt” villains fleecing the treasury and lining their pockets, as Hudak suggests? After several weeks of legislative committee hearings, culminating this week with a rare appearance by Kathleen Wynne as a sitting premier, this episode reads more like tragedy than conspiracy.
Wynne disclosed that at a formal briefing last month, officials estimated the Oakville cancellation costs could range between $33 million and $136 million. By the time she testified Tuesday, the OPA had more than doubled its tally to $310 million. We won’t get an authoritative number until the auditor completes his own probe, at Wynne’s request.
Against that backdrop, the blame game is more of a guessing game played by politicians. Voters need to ask more probing questions of all parties — and themselves.
Here’s the real scandal that everyone covers up: NIMBYism gives us the government, and the gas plants, we deserve.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Martin Regg Cohn
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