Electricity in Ontario is so expensive because generations of governments have treated it as a tool of politics and for intervening in the economy, none of the major parties contesting the current election is going to stop, and nobody, but nobody, will cut your hydro bill meaningfully.

We call it “hydro” but that’s already misleading: Ontario’s electricity is mostly nuclear. Last year almost twice as much of Ontario’s energy came from nuclear reactors as from all other sources put together. Why? Because in the 1950s and ’60s, our governments thought they could kickstart an international export business by developing Canadian nuclear reactors. We sold a few, but to this day hardly anybody in the world uses CANDU reactors but us.

“I see energy as an economic fundamental and not a plaything,” Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak told the Citizen’s editorial board this week. Hudak says the government’s priority should first be to make sure Ontario’s power supply is reliable and, after that, as cheap as possible.

If he didn’t treat energy as a plaything, he’d be the first premier who didn’t.

Supply, at a price

Ontario’s energy supply is in better shape than when the Liberals took office in 2003: Nuclear reactors have been refurbished, new generating stations have been built, old coal plants have been all but wiped out, and we consistently generate more energy than we need. The Liberals crow about all those things and they aren’t wrong.

But they came at a big, big cost. The average price of electricity so far this year is the highest it’s ever been. Usually electricity is most expensive in summer, but according to the agency that monitors Ontario’s power system, the Independent Electricity System Operator, the price this past March was more than double what it was last July — more expensive than it’s been in any June, July or August since 2005, in fact, when the system was at its most delicate and we were buying power from anywhere we could.

The price is going to keep going up. The Liberals’ own long-term energy plan, a government document, predicts the total cost of Ontario’s electricity supply will keep increasing until 2022 before it stabilizes — but even then, it will be more expensive than it is today.

The Liberals have invested heavily in a power grid that was in dangerously ramshackle condition when they took it over. For decades nobody wanted to face up to the reality that Ontario Hydro was dysfunctional and was neither charging nor spending enough; the Tories under Mike Harris and Ernie Eves recognized there was a crisis in the 1990s and broke it up into smaller Crown corporations and agencies, but they hadn’t got around to renovating power plants and replacing power lines.

That was overdue work, it was expensive, and the Liberals kept on with it.

But they also got cocky, investing heavily in wind and solar power — billions of dollars’ worth — to try to kickstart a domestic green-energy industry.

The great green experiment

The Liberals’ green-energy policy has run over local governments by taking away cities’ and towns’ authority over new wind and solar farms. You can hardly drive along any rural highway in Ontario without seeing a billboard, placards on fences, makeshift signs on stakes damning the Liberals for ruining the countryside with wind farms.