Elections

Even the Aussies Know, That Hudak is the Way to GO!!!! Yaaayyyy!!!!

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Ontario’s Progressive Conservative’s Leader Tim Hudak – Didn’t Drink the Kool-Aid

May 15, 2014 by 

Jim Jones

Jim Jones was a charismatic cult leader with a colourful past who – amid allegations that he’d been physically, emotionally, and sexually abusing his acolytes at his San Francisco compound – fled the US and set up a new camp at “Jonestown”, Guyana. Close to 1,000 of his “disciples” followed him South – lured by socialist utopian promises of a “new dawn” for all those who believed in him – putting the “blind” into “blind faith”.

Jones’s cult status started early – his mum, Lynetta claimed that she’d given birth to the Messiah. He was an avid Communist and fancied himself a preacher in the league of his heroes, Billy Graham and Oral Roberts. Jones never lacked self-belief – telling worshipers he was the reincarnation of Mahatma Gandhi; as well as Jesus of Nazareth, Gotama Buddha and Vladimir Lenin: a lineup of alter-egos that most preachers would find hard to top.

In November 1978, Jim Jones encouraged his faithful band of followers to gulp down gallons of sickly-sweet, grape-flavoured Kool-Aid. Problem was, it was cordial with a “kick” – 910 of his devoted followers (including 303 children) perished from cyanide poisoning. Oops! So much for “blind faith”.

Since then, “drinking the Kool-Aid” has been a figure of speech used by Americans to cover any person or group holding an unquestioned belief, argument, or philosophy without critical examination; and also covers anyone knowingly going along with a doomed or dangerous idea because of peer pressure. Hmm, sound strangely familiar?

Well, around the globe many of our political betters have already “drunk the Kool-Aid”.

Lured by ridiculous promises of “free” energy and tens of thousands of wonderful, new “green” jobs, politicians of all hues have willingly entered economic suicide pacts – by signing up to completely unsustainable wind power policies – in Spain, Germany, the UK, the US, Australia and Canada, to name a few.

In Canada, however, there is at least one politician who obviously didn’t drink the Kool-Aid.

Tim Hudak heads up the Progressive Conservative party – which, unlike Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals – has made the obvious connection between Ontario’s giant fan roll-out and spiralling power prices.

tim-hudak

Hudak has also rumbled the fact that – not only did Ontario’s wind rush fail to produce the promised “green” employment bonanza – but that the wind-power-driven escalation in power costs has killed thousands of jobs in the real economy.

Wynne’s Liberals were early Kool-Aid consumers – committing Ontario to fork out for wind power subsidies, which are among the most ludicrously generous on earth.

In the lead up to Ontario’s upcoming election Hudak is going head-to-head with Wynne and has slammed the economy-killing energy policies dreamed up by her Liberals.

Hudak is all set to take the axe to wind power subsidies – in an effort to bring spiralling power prices under control and to return Ontario to a position of economic competitiveness.

Here’s the Toronto Sun on Hudak’s plan to restore some economic sanity to Ontario’s energy policy.

Hudak will end wind, solar fiasco
Toronto Sun
13 May 2014

It’s amazing only one leader in the Ontario election campaign – the Progressive Conservative’s Tim Hudak – has promised to end the subsidization of inefficient, unreliable and expensive wind and solar power.

This is an obvious way to save taxpayers and hydro ratepayers billions of dollars in future costs.

Premier Kathleen Wynne can’t make that promise because to do so would be to admit the Liberals’ naive infatuation with green energy has been a financial disaster, as the non-partisan Auditor General of Ontario concluded in 2011.

The auditor general said the Liberals blundered into green energy with no business plan and no economic research, ignoring the advice of their own experts and costing taxpayers and electricity consumers billions of added dollars on their hydro bills for decades to come.

The auditor general not only found Liberal claims their Green Energy Act would create 50,000 jobs between 2009 and 2012 were nonsense, but that experience around the world has shown so-called green energy destroys more jobs than it creates because it inevitably leads to higher electricity prices.

As for NDP leader Andrea Horwath – who says she’ll rescind in 2016 the Liberals’ 2010 decision to add the 8% provincial sales tax to hydro bills – she propped up the Liberals as they were signing more and more wind and solar deals, literally throwing more and more public money down a black hole.

Incredibly, Wynne is promising to keep doing this if she’s elected, which is utter madness.

Hudak is the only leader of the three major parties telling the truth, noting he can’t break existing contracts the Liberals have already signed with wind and solar energy developers.

But he can stop throwing good money after bad.

Hudak is also promising to return local autonomy to municipalities so they can decide if they want wind turbines and solar panels in their communities, instead of having them rammed down their throats by the Liberals through their dictatorial Green Energy Act.

As for Liberals’ claim they replaced coal power with wind, it’s utter nonsense.

The Liberals replaced coal with nuclear power and natural gas.

Wind and solar are just another multi-billion-dollar Liberal boondoggle, to go along with their eHealth, Ornge and cancelled gas plants scandals and financial disasters.
Toronto Sun

Energy policy based on nothing more than “blind faith” was always bound to end in tears; as the Toronto Sun’s editor put it in the piece above:

[T]he Liberals blundered into green energy with no business plan and no economic research, ignoring the advice of their own experts and costing taxpayers and electricity consumers billions …

Australians needn’t consider themselves any smarter than the Canadians, on that score.

Our Federal Government signed us up to the mandatory Renewable Energy Target in 2001 without any economic research – let alone a proper cost/benefit analysis of a policy which perversely favours insanely expensive, intermittent and unreliable wind power. That process will be undertaken for the very first time in 2014 – as part of the RET Review. Better late than never, as they say.

Fortune has, however, smiled on Australia – it is, after all, the “Lucky Country” – because the RET Review panel is made up of people who clearly didn’t drink the Kool-Aid (see our posts here and here).

From what we hear emanating from Canberra, STT predicts the imminent demise of Australia’s now beleaguered, bitter and angry Wind Power Cult – and a return to energy market sanity in the very near future.

remember-jonestown-small-jpg

 

 

YES! Tim Hudak CAN save the Day!!!!

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Killing green energy contracts

 

Done the right way, a new PC government could indeed rip up green energy contracts with no liability. Should they?

Brent Lewin/BloombergDone the right way, a new PC government could indeed rip up green energy contracts with no liability. Should they

Hudak’s Ontario Conservatives can easily and legally negate the giveaways the Liberals had lavished on renewables developers

Tim Hudak says the Ontario Conservatives, if elected, will cancel lucrative wind and solar contracts put in place under the Liberals’ green energy program. Can he do so without racking up huge compensation costs?

The answer is yes – if he does it the right way.

The wrong way is to direct the Ontario Power Authority to simply terminate existing contracts, which have robust compensation clauses. The liabilities would dwarf the $1.1-billion paid out by the Liberals for cancelled gas plants.

The right way is to legislate: to enact a statute that declares green contracts to be null and void, and the province to be free from liability. The compensation clauses in the contract will be rendered inoperative if the statute says so.

Statutes can override iron-clad provisions in a contract because that is the nature of legislative supremacy: Legislatures can pass laws of any kind, as long as they are within their jurisdiction and do not offend the constitution. Legislating on electricity production is clearly a provincial power, as are “property and civil rights.”

Since the Canadian constitution does not guarantee property or contract rights, there are no obvious constitutional limitations on a provincial legislature’s ability to change any contract as it likes. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, in Canada there is no constitutional right to compensation for property expropriated by government.

Related

Courts interpret ambiguous statutes as implicitly requiring compensation be paid to the owner of expropriated property. But if the statute is clear that no compensation shall be paid, the words of the statute govern. Where a statute and a contract are in conflict, the statute prevails. Although unilateral and retroactive changes to established contracts might seem to offend the rule of law, the Supreme Court of Canada has said that prospectivity is not a constitutional requirement for legislation.

What about NAFTA? Could a U.S. or Mexican firm with a cancelled green energy contract in Ontario seek compensation for discriminatory expropriation under Chapter 11? If government action singled out a specific party’s contract for termination, it could well be characterized as discriminatory. But if Hudak’s statute cancelled large numbers of contracts for a public policy objective and treated domestic and foreign firms similarly, then NAFTA protections are unlikely to apply.

So, done the right way, a new PC government could indeed rip up green energy contracts with no liability. Should they? While legislatures can cancel contracts, they rarely do so because it penalizes parties who have done business with government, and therefore creates a disincentive to do so in the future. It erodes economic confidence and credibility. For Conservatives and their supporters, cancelling energy contracts may depend on what they find more offensive: Rich subsidies for the production of solar and wind energy, or unilateral changes to valid contracts. No renewable energy contracts have been cancelled in Ontario yet, but in Europe this line has been crossed: Spain, France, Italy and Belgium have all stepped back from their original terms for the production and purchase of renewable power, to the detriment of their domestic renewable energy industries.

The McGuinty Liberals did not pass a statute to escape the bill for cancelled gas plants. It is difficult to know why without all the facts. Perhaps they thought $1.1-billion in costs and erased records would not come to light. Perhaps they feared that legislation would have required disclosure of facts they wanted hidden. Perhaps refusing to pay compensation would have crippled their ability to enter into future contracts with the same or similar companies. Perhaps there were foreign firms involved that could, in fact, have claimed under NAFTA for discriminatory expropriation. Perhaps they judged the political and economic costs to be too high – it is one thing to roll back a program created by a previous government, especially if you have campaigned on the issue, and quite another for a long-standing government to arbitrarily cancel its own contracts. Or perhaps they did not have an opportunity until after they lost their majority, which made it politically untenable.

Contracts are safe when both parties are bound in law to follow them. Contracting with government means that one party has the power to change the rules after the contract is made. Buyers and sellers beware: At the end of the day, the protection in a government contract is not legal but political.

Bruce Pardy is a law professor at Queen’s University.

Tim Hudak Promises to End Wind Scam…..other parties will continue to rob us!

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D’Amato: To understand Ontario’s election,

take a careful look at your hydro bill

By  Luisa D’Amato
SEE MOREarticles from this author

It’s so easy to get sidetracked by the distractions.

Ontario Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne goes for a morning jog in Kitchener’s Victoria Park, leaving a reporter out of breath as he tries to follow. Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak gets kicked off a Toronto subway when he tries to make an announcement, because his team didn’t get permission.

These events grab the headlines because they’re anecdotes, easy to tell. But they have nothing to do with what a political party will or won’t do for you if it wins.

On the other hand, if you look at your hydro bill, and what each party will do about it, it tells you something significant about each of them.

The cost of electricity is a key issue. Ontario’s electricity rates have soared and are now among the highest in North America.

In part, this is because of the Liberal government’s “green energy” plan that offers subsidies to those that put up wind turbines and solar panels, then sell the power back to the power grid.

Expensive electricity is stressful. There’s evidence that it’s forcing manufacturing employers out of the province. Last week, Don Walker, CEO of auto parts giant Magna International, said: “I doubt we’ll add any more plants in Ontario” in part because of electricity costs.

Full platforms have not been released by the parties yet. But here’s what each has said so far about your hydro bill:

Greens: Conservation is their focus. They’d require utilities to provide grants and “affordable” loans for people to make their homes more energy efficient.

Liberals: Their latest announcement was billed as good news for consumers, but when you check the details, it isn’t.

Their plan is to relieve consumers of the debt retirement charge from the old Ontario Hydro (nearly $8 on my last household bill of $177 over two months).

That sounds helpful, until you realize that the “clean energy benefit,” which gives customers a 10-per-cent break on the bill ($19.35 in my case), is also being eliminated. And there’ll be a 90-cents-a-month hike for most homes to subsidize low-income customers. Total impact: I’m paying $13.15 more every two months, and that’s before the cost of electricity goes up again.

New Democrats: Piecemeal policy. There’s very little so far. Leader Andrea Horwath announced Monday that she will “take the HST” off hydro bills “to put money back into the budgets of middle-class families.” Further down in the press release, it’s revealed that actually it’s only the “provincial portion” of the HST that would come off. On my bill, that’s $13.70 in savings over a two-month period.

Conservatives: Shock therapy: The plan is to bring electricity prices down, and therefore keep industrial employers here, by ending those Liberal subsidies for wind and solar costs, cutting the hydro bureaucracy (Hudak says there are 11,000 people making more than $100,000 a year) and buying cheap energy from the United States and Quebec.

This election boils down to a choice: Do you like things the way they are, or do you want big changes?

The Conservatives offer radical change. The Liberals offer their record over the past 11 years. The New Democrats offer tweaks on the Liberal program. And those basic distinctions are true of a lot more issues than just your electricity bill.

ldamato@therecord.com

Companies Leaving Ontario Because of Ever-rising Costs for Doing Business!

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Magna says no new plants for Canada, cites Ontario energy costs
Ontario energy, pension costs a concern, the company says.

Magna CEO Don Walker speaks at the company’s annual general meeting in Toronto on Thursday.
CHRIS YOUNG/THE CANADIAN PRESS

Magna CEO Don Walker speaks at the company’s annual general meeting in Toronto on Thursday.

By: Dana Flavelle Economy, Business Reporter, Published on Thu May 08 2014
Magna International Inc. says it has no plans to open any new plants in Canada despite a lower dollar, chief executive officer Don Walker says.
The nearly 10 per cent decline in the Canadian dollar relative to the U.S. greenback has helped make the Aurora-based global auto parts supplier more cost competitive, Walker told the company’s annual general meeting Thursday.
But the company said it’s concerned about Ontario’s industrial electricity rates and proposed pension plan, along with the future of its auto assembly plants.
“I’m worried about electricity prices in Ontario, where all of our plants are located,” Walker told a press conference after the meeting at The Westin Prince Hotel in Toronto. Magna operates 46 auto plants in Canada, all in Ontario where the major auto makers’ assembly plants are located.
Walker said he hoped whoever wins the Ontario election on June 12 takes action to reduce energy costs for the corporate sector.
Magna is also concerned about the proposed new Ontario Pension Plan, a key plank in Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne’s election platform. The plan aims to close a shortfall in Canadians’ retirement savings.
But Magna said the plan would add $1,900 a year per employee to the company’s costs.
“That’s a pretty significant cost to us,” chief financial officer Vincent Galifi said, noting the company has 19,000 employees in the province.
Walker also said the Canadian and Ontario governments need to invest in auto assembly plants if they want to create and keep auto industry jobs.
“If the assembly plants all go it’ll be a lot more difficult (for Magna) to remain in Canada,” he said.
Earlier this year, Chrysler backed out of talks with the federal and Ontario governments about incentives to expand its plants in Windsor and Brampton, saying the plan had become a political football.
Ontario Tory leader Tim Hudak had slammed the governing Liberals for allowing Chrysler to hold provincial taxpayers “ransom,” calling the incentives “corporate welfare.”
Walker, who is also head of the industry-wide Canadian Automotive Partnership Council, said governments need to realize investments in auto plants pay big dividends by creating jobs and increasing tax revenues.
Globally, Magna plans to open 23 new plants, including eight in North America. None would be in Canada.
Despite Magna’s concern, it continues to invest in its Ontario plants, spending up to $150 million per year on capital expenditures, Walker noted.
It also continues to hire and create jobs, he noted.
Last month, Magna announced it would create 75 new jobs with a $1.5 million expansion of a plant in Newmarket, Ont.
Walker’s comments came after the company reported higher first quarter profit and sales and raised its guidance for the rest of the year.
For the first three months of the year, the company said it earned $393 million, or $1.76 per share, up from $369 million, or $1.57 per share, a year earlier. The company reports in U.S. dollars.
Analysts on average expected earnings per share of $2.05, according to estimates compiled by Thomson Reuters.
The company had sales of $8.96 billion in the quarter, compared with $8.3 billion in the same quarter of last year.
Looking ahead to the year, the company said it expects sales of between $34.9 billion and $36.6 billion around the world, up from $34.8 billion in 2013.
Operating margins will be in the mid to high 6 per cent range, versus 6.3 per cent a year earlier. And capital spending will be $1.4 billion, versus $1.2 billion a year ago, the company said.
The increase came as Magna raised its outlook for the auto industry in North America and Europe.
It now expects North American auto makers to produce about 16.8 million vehicles, while Europe is expected to produce about 19.5 million. That compared with earlier expectations for 16.7 million and 19.3 million respectively.
“In the first quarter of 2014, our North American, European, and Asian production sales, as well as tooling, engineering and other sales and complete vehicle assembly sales all increased, while our rest of world production sales declined, each relative to the comparable quarter in 2013,” the company said in a news release.
The company’s Magna Closures unit is expanding its Dortec manufacturing plant to produce electronic control modules for power closure and roof systems.
The plant is also expected to produce a new electronic side-door latch that will be lighter and cost less.
The company, which operates in 29 countries and employs 198,000 people, supplies powertrains, cameras, closures and other auto parts. Major customers include General Motors, BMW, Chrysler, Ford and Volkswagen.
With files from Star wire services

Put an End to the Wind Scam, Before it Bankrupts our Province!

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Hudak will end wind, solar fiasco

 

 

It’s amazing only one leader in the Ontario election campaign — the Progressive Conservative’s Tim Hudak — has promised to end the subsidization of inefficient, unreliable and expensive wind and solar power.

This is an obvious way to save taxpayers and hydro ratepayers billions of dollars in future costs.

Premier Kathleen Wynne can’t make that promise because to do so would be to admit the Liberals’ naive infatuation with green energy has been a financial disaster, as the non-partisan Auditor General of Ontario concluded in 2011.

The auditor general said the Liberals blundered into green energy with no business plan and no economic research, ignoring the advice of their own experts and costing taxpayers and electricity consumers billions of added dollars on their hydro bills for decades to come.

The auditor general not only found Liberal claims their Green Energy Act would create 50,000 jobs between 2009 and 2012 were nonsense, but that experience around the world has shown so-called green energy destroys more jobs than it creates because it inevitably leads to higher electricity prices.

As for NDP leader Andrea Horwath — who says she’ll rescind in 2016 the Liberals’ 2010 decision to add the 8% provincial sales tax to hydro bills — she propped up the Liberals as they were signing more and more wind and solar deals, literally throwing more and more public money down a black hole.

Incredibly, Wynne is promising to keep doing this if she’s elected, which is utter madness.

Hudak is the only leader of the three major parties telling the truth, noting he can’t break existing contracts the Liberals have already signed with wind and solar energy developers.

But he can stop throwing good money after bad.

Hudak is also promising to return local autonomy to municipalities so they can decide if they want wind turbines and solar panels in their communities, instead of having them rammed down their throats by the Liberals through their dictatorial Green Energy Act.

As for Liberals’ claim they replaced coal power with wind, it’s utter nonsense.

The Liberals replaced coal with nuclear power and natural gas.

Wind and solar are just another multi-billion-dollar Liberal boondoggle, to go along with their eHealth, Ornge and cancelled gas plants scandals and financial disasters.

Kathleen Wynne lives in her own little world….

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Campaign without a clue

John-Robson

BY  ,PARLIAMENTARY BUREAU

 

How can we expect good government from politicians so clueless about themselves? I mean, take Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. Please.

She seems quite pleasant. But she exhibits an eerie lack of self-awareness.

Consider that she chose to kick off her re-election campaign in the old riding of disgraced former Premier Dalton McGuinty. She knew enough to make sure he wasn’t there and did not, when she dared speak his name aloud, appear with a flash and a bang. But she said, “What better place to get started” than a riding “known for a rich history of leaders we can all be proud of.”

Oh, you mean the guy who lied about not raising taxes, whether they were taxes, and whether he’d run deficits, ripped a Tory plan to fund religious schools when his wife taught in the separate Catholic system and he personally had endorsed a separate Jewish system, reversed himself on funding intensive autism treatment for older kids, public-private partnerships for hospitals and abortion and just generally lied a lot before vanishing like an incriminating e-mail after wasting a billion dollars cancelling power plants to save Liberal seats.

You’re seriously proud of that? Or did you somehow not notice it even though you were there the whole time?

Wynne then claimed Ontario voters face a “critical choice.” We don’t. But the constant atmosphere of crisis in politics is fuelled by people unable to grasp that half of all elections are less important than the average even if they’re in them, because they have no perspective on themselves.

Thus she warned “This is a pivotal time, we really cannot risk veering off track — whether we go to the far left or to the far right… We need to move forward with a steady, balanced approach.” And she urged citizens to choose wisely between “risky tactics” and “safe hands.”

Now this is a preposterous misread of her adversaries. The far left wants to nationalize industry and disarm the West, the far right wants to eliminate social programs and ban abortion. Horwath and Hudak are boring fiddlers solidly within the mainstream of contemporary political thought. Unfortunately.

Of course you might say well, she’s just lying about her opponents, a fitting tribute to D. McGuinty in his old riding. But before leaping to that conclusion, consider that a woman entirely clueless about herself and her colleagues could certainly be in that state regarding her adversaries. And if Wynne ever heard the Delphic maxim “Know thyself” she plainly didn’t understand it.

For instance this “safe hands” business. To work, a lie has to be plausible. But the gas plant scandal wasn’t just sleazy. It was panicky and amateurish. Deleting e-mails and thinking we wouldn’t find out has “run in circles, scream and shout” written all over it. And it’s just one in a series of bungling scandals from eHealth to Ornge.

Then there’s the core notion, common among Liberals, that they hold the vital centre against the sterile extremes haunted by ideologues. Forget calling the others far left and far right. How can she depict herself as moderate?

The Ontario Liberals have doubled spending, doubled the debt, and expanded government in every direction they can think of. Look how fast they ditched the Drummond Report to preserve all-day kindergarten which their steady hands then botched. They are well left of Andrea Horwath judging by their record. But Wynne does not acknowledge it because, I maintain, she doesn’t know it.

What she said, startling as it may seem, really is what she thinks. She’s is running on a record she doesn’t understand, to implement a platform she doesn’t understand, against opponents she doesn’t understand, for reasons she doesn’t understand.

Business as usual in politics, I’m afraid.

 

ONE HUNDRED AND SIX…Compelling Reasons Not to Vote Liberal!

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Just a few facts on the past 11, almost 12 years of Liberal government;

Green
Energy Act (20 billion)

eHealth scandal (almost 2
billion)

Gas
plant scandal (1.1 billion theft and cover-up of our tax
dollars)

Deleting
e-mails

ORNGE scandal (700
million)

Ontario Northland Railway
scandal (820 million)

Caledonia Hydro Line scandal
(116 million)

Lobbyist scandal (two
multi-million dollar scandals)

Eco-Fee Reversal scandal (18
million)

CancerCare Ontario scandal
(millions of dollars)

Slush Fund scandal (32
million)

Niagara Falls Commission
scandal

Ontario Power Generation
scandal

Children’s Aid Society
scandal

Nanticoke Coal Power Plant
Shutdown scandal

G20 Secretly Approved Police
Power scandal

Auto Insurance
scandal

Foreign Scholarships scandal
(our students pay the highest tuition in Canada while foreign students
get free university educations)

Offshore Wind Turbines
scandal

Samsung scandal
(sole-sourcing)

Pan Am scandal (cost increase
from 1.4 to 2.5 billion)

MPAC scandal (over and
under-valuation of properties)

OLG scandal (millions of
dollars)

Isotape Shortage
scandal

Chemotherapy Dosage
scandal

Payout for Pan Am CEO (250
million)

Trillium Wind Power and Sky
Power Limited lawsuit (500 million)

Cement company lawsuit (275
million) – Quarry outside Hamilton was scuttled for political
reasons

School bus service
lawsuit

Augusta/Westland lawsuit as it
pertains to ORNGE

Elliot Lake Collapse lawsuits
(two lives lost due to recovery delays)

Ontario Medical Association
lawsuits – applied to Superior Court alleging McGuinty not negotiating
in “good faith”

Breast Screening scandal
(ensuing lawsuits due to thousands of misread mammograms, one life
lost)

Class-action lawsuit for autism
funding cancellation

Over 650 new agencies, boards,
commissions and entities such as LHIN’s and CCAC’s

Over 300,000 new public servants
many of whom, are on the sunshine list

Public sector employment in
health care increased by 39%

Public sector employment in
social services increased by 39%

Public sector employment in
education increased by 34%

Paying more Liberal taxes only
to receive fewer services as taxes now being spent to pay the salaries
and perks of newly-assigned, Liberal-friendly public
servants

Gutted our manufacturing base
(job growth across Canada except in Ontario)

Nearly one million Ontarians now
out of work

Increased spending by 80% while
our economy grew by only 9%

More than doubled our debt to
288 billion

Running a 11.3 billion annual
deficit

Debt
servicing costs will rise from 11.4 billion today to 14.5 billion once
the debt exceeds 300 billion by 2017-18

Interest payments on our debt
now the third largest budget expenditure after health and
education

Task Force on Competitiveness,
Productivity and Economic Progress confirmed that McGuinty’s Green
Energy Act grossly underestimated the cost to consumers and
overestimated the number of new jobs that would be
created

Tax
collectors getting 45,000.00 severance packages for switching job titles
from provincial to federal

Two ministries under an OPP
criminal investigation – ORNGE and gas plant
scandals

Pharmacy war

Illegal green
taxes

Increased smart meter,
electricity, hydro, tuition and car insurance costs

Implemented tire tax,
electronics tax, eco fee, health premium (tax), WSIB tax increase, HST,
beer surtax

Failing grade on ADHD
education

Ranking the lowest of all
provinces for fiscal performance

Delisting eye exams,
physiotherapy, chiropractic care, diabetic strips,
etc.

Increasing wait time for
cataract surgery

No longer covered for eye exams
yet taxpayers paying for sex changes

Wait
time for nursing home bed tripled

Failure to disclose elevated
radiation levels

OES missed its collection and
recycling targets by 59%

Not correcting the foreign
ownership of our beer market

Acceptance of garbage striker
extortion

Harassing labour
inspectors

Kowtowing to green energy
lobbies

Imposing blood alcohol rules
that punish people who are not impaired

Public utilities donating to
Liberals

Voting to cover up the Niagara
Parks Commission scandal

Emergency room wait times not
meeting provincial targets

Put on notice by Standard and
Poor, credit rating downgraded, under a very serious credit
watch

Have-not province for the first
time in Canadian history

Borrowing more debt than any
province except NB

Dramatic cuts in health care
services in schools

Nurses getting bonuses despite a
wage freeze

Insufficient senior homecare
services

Failing grade of Family
Responsibility Office

Abstained from vote to
investigate CBC expenses

Cash kickback scheme involving
government cleaning contracts

Talked about a two-year freeze
on wages for public sector while previously giving the OPP a 5% wage
increase – the OPP received another raise of over 8% in January,
2014

Energy
now unaffordable yet we must pay Quebec and some north-eastern States to
take our surplus energy

Encouraging farmers to build
small-scale solar projects but having no way to connect them to the
power grid

Laid up in US hospital beds as
no beds available in Ontario

Refusing public inquiry into G20
fiasco

Giving those who hire only
newcomers a 10,000.00 tax credit

Third highest user of food
banks

Announced pay freezes knowing
that 38,000 were getting a 3% salary increase after the
election

Hiding hospital errors from the
public

Teachers skipping classes to
assist with anti-Conservative campaign

Failing grade in northern
forestry management

Almost 40 C. difficile deaths to
date

Loss of
6,500 cancer patient health records

Highest rent increase rate in
years

Ignoring evidence that wind
turbines can cause poor health

Workers at eHealth suing for not
receiving bonuses

Liam denied eye care that
another child is receiving under OHIP

Ontarians pleading for their
lives or dying because they aren’t getting the health care they
need

Lady
with a brain tumor denied help to cover costs which costs are covered in
Manitoba

Electricity rates to rise 42%
over five years

Prior loss of 60,000 jobs in the
horse racing industry – now attempting to correct
this

Presto

Ring of Fire

Cleaning kick-back scheme that
ended with the conviction of three persons (two of whom were employed by
Wynne’s ministry at the time …)

Muslim prayers allowed in our
publicly-funded school system while the Lord’s Prayer has been
banned

Tim Hudak refuses to Carry On with the Wind Scam! Windweasels will scurry!!!

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Hudak vows to pull the plug on wind power

BY  ,QUEEN’S PARK BUREAU CHIEF

FIRST POSTED: MONDAY, MAY 12, 2014 05:24 PM EDT | UPDATED: MONDAY, MAY 12, 2014 05:50 PM EDT

Wind farm
Wind farms. (QMI files)

It’s time to blow off expensive subsidies to wind and solar power, PC Leader Tim Hudak says.

The Progressive Conservatives would, if elected to govern, refuse to sign any more renewable energy deals at high rates of return and focus on creating an electricity system reliant on gas, hydro operations and nuclear power.

A Tory government would also give more control to local municipalities over the siting of wind projects, he said.

“If people can have a say about a hot dog stand going in for a Canada Day celebration, shouldn’t they have a say about massive industrial wind turbines in their backyard?” Hudak said.

The PCs say they will not proceed with any wind or solar applications that have not been already approved.

Those projects that have been approved but not yet connected to the grid would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Such a move would save $20 billion and help businesses create 40,000 jobs through more affordable electricity — numbers confirmed by an independent economist brought in by the PCs, Hudak said.

The election campaign brought Hudak to Stanpac Inc. Monday, a food, dairy and beverage packaging manufacturer located in Smithville which is in the Niagara Region.

Murray Bain, Stanpac’s vice president of marketing, said the company would like to expand its Ontario operations but the rising cost of electricity in the province makes it more likely that those jobs will be added to its Texas plant.

“Every dollar we spend on energy could be a dollar that we would use for new jobs and higher pay cheques in Ontario,” Bain said. “We need to remember that government experiments that drive up energy costs will also end up taking jobs away. High energy prices are a self-inflicted wound on Ontario’s economy. It’s time to heal that.”

Premier Kathleen Wynne said Monday that her government has renegotiated a renewable energy deal with Samsung to find savings, but remains committed to its overall plan for renewable energy, including wind power.

Ontario’s green electricity initiatives had created 42,000 jobs by the end of 2013 in construction, installation, energy auditing, operations and maintenance, engineering, consulting, manufacturing, finance, information technology and software, the Liberals say.

Northern Ontario companies and lower income families benefit from government programs to keep their hydro costs manageable, Wynne added.

Hudak said the cost of hydro has gone up $630 a year for the average family under the Ontario Liberals.

 

More Proof that the Liberals are Scamming the Province!

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Bett
      THE WYNNE VERSION OF ELECTRICITY RATE RELIEF
On April 24, 2014, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne announced that the Debt Retirement Charge (DRC), a 0.7 cent-per-kWh charge on Ontario electricity consumers, would be terminated at the end of 2015. The Premier described this as a move that would “bring significant rate relief”. Is this true?
As background, the 0.7 cent charge may sound small, but it isn’t. It collects about $900 million every year from Ontario electricity ratepayers. The charge was introduced in 2002 to pay for the “residual stranded debt” of the former Ontario Hydro. The original residual stranded debt, back in 1998, was $7.8 billion.
In the 2012 Ontario Budget, it was revealed that, up to March 31, 2012, the Ontario government (through the Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation) had collected $12.8 billion dollars as a result of the debt retirement charge. In the fall 2013 Update, the Finance Minister reported that, although about $1.5 billion more had been collected to that point in time, the remaining residual stranded debt was $11.3 billion. So, after paying about $14.3 billion to retire a $7.8 billion debt, Ontario ratepayers still owed $11.3 billion. This amazing arithmetic is due to the Ontario government’s addition of interest to the original amount owing and its switching of certain costs incurred by Ontario Hydro’s successor companies unto the “residual stranded debt account”.
This is a story that the Ontario Auditor General may someday want to investigate. Let us return, however, to the claim that removing the DRC will result in significant rate relief.
By the end of December, 2015, the DRC will have collected $15.5 billion, so Ontario ratepayers will have paid almost double the original $7.8 billion owing.
Just one year ago, the Ontario Energy Board approved an electricity (i.e. commodity charge) rate increase that cost the average ratepayer $3.63 a month, or $44 annually. It followed that with another increase in November 2013 raising rates by $4.00 per month, or $48 annually. Then, on April 1, 2014, there was another increase of $2.83 per month, or $34 annually. Those increases did not include rate increases for the “delivery” or “regulatory” lines on our electricity bills, which also increased. So, in just one year, the electricity rates jumped $126 annually and Wynne’s announced rate relief won’t happen until the end of 2015.
2015 just happens to also be the year the Ontario Clean Energy Benefit (OECB) ends. The OECB reduces the average bill by $13.30 per month or $160 annually. Ontario’s taxpayers pay it, so it is a subsidy from residents’ right pockets to their left pockets. The average bill (electricity, or “commodity charge ” only) at the start of 2016 will thus be $286 higher on an annual basis than it was as of April 30, 2013. Adding the HST brings the increase to $323. There will also be further increases from the Ontario Energy Board’s scheduled rate setting onDecember 1, 2014, May 1, 2015 and December 1, 2015; those will add a minimum of $100 to homeowners’ electricity costs.
In other words, the average residential bill will have jumped by approximately $425 per year. That represents a 25% increase in electricity rates in two years before Premier Wynne’s “significant rate relief” of $160 per year occurs. Just as the DRC is ended, another scheduled charge from the recent announcement (aimed at reducing energy poverty) of $11 will be added.
By December 1, 2015, our electricity costs for residences will be charged out at over 21 cents per kilowatt (kWh). That will only get worse as more contracted wind and solar plants enter the grid. Add in expected increases in the “delivery” and “regulatory” lines, tack on HST and all-in costs will be in the neighbourhood of 30 cents a kWh! Ontario residents will be challenging Germany and Denmark for the privilege of having the most expensive rates in the industrialized world.
Some relief!
Please share this important information with all of your contacts!

Kathleen Wynne is destroying our Province. Time Hudak will turn things around!

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Kathleen Wynne says Tim Hudak will

plunge Ontario into recession as

PCs take aim at Liberals’ ‘bloated’ energy bureaucracy

Keith Leslie, Canadian Press | May 12, 2014 | Last Updated: May 12 2:11 PM ET
More from Canadian Press

Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak, left, walks in with employees before he makes an announcement at a packaging plant about creating 40,000 jobs in Ontario with affordable energy during a campaign stop in Smithville, Ont., on Monday, May 12, 2014.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan DenetteOntario PC Leader Tim Hudak, left, walks in with employees before he makes an announcement at a packaging plant about creating 40,000 jobs in Ontario with affordable energy during a campaign stop in Smithville, Ont., on Monday, May 12, 20

TORONTO — Ontario’s opposition parties started the second week of the campaign for the June 12 election Monday by focusing on soaring electricity bills, which they blamed on the Liberal government’s green energy policies.

Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak said he’d end generous subsidies for wind and solar power, cut the “bloated” bureaucracy at Hydro One and Ontario Power Generation to help get electricity rates low enough to generate 40,000 new jobs.

“We need to pare down that massive hydro bureaucracy,” Hudak said at a factory in Smithville, in the Niagara Peninsula.

“They have 11,000 people in the hydro bureaucracy making $100,000 a year, can you believe that?”

After announcing plans last Friday to trim 100,000 public sector jobs, Hudak also said he would reduce the number of provincial electricity agencies created after the breakup of the old Ontario Hydro.

Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne says Hudak’s plan for the province would plunge Ontario back into a recession.

Wynne says Hudak’s “reckless” election campaign pledge to shrink the public sector by 100,000 jobs would “sacrifice our fragile economic recovery.”

Speaking at the Carpenters’ Union local 27 training centre in Vaughan, Wynne said Hudak would fire many of the people who hire skilled tradespeople for home renovations.

“We believe this is exactly the wrong way to go,” she said.

“His approach would sacrifice our fragile economic recovery and would plunge us back toward recession. That may be his approach but it’s not mine and it is not ours.”

Wynne says when people can’t afford to build or renovate their homes, highly skilled apprentices would have trouble finding work.

She says a Liberal government would safeguard those jobs by investing $130 billion over a decade in infrastructure projects across the province.

Hudak has said that if his party wins the June 12 provincial election, he wants to shrink the public sector to increase efficiencies and spur job creation in the private sector.

“Unlike Tim Hudak, we believe that jobs are more important than cuts,” Wynne said. “Tim Hudak is proposing a reckless and really devastating cut that would take 100,000 jobs and would replace those with pink slips. He’s making a pink-slip pledge.”

Campaigning in Thunder Bay, Ont., New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath promised to scrap the provincial portion of HST on hydro bills if she becomes premier, which she said would save homeowners about $120 a year.

“Instead of making life affordable, the Liberals decided to add an unfair tax on top of the highest electricity rates in the country,” said Horwath. “We’re going to take it off and make life affordable for families.”

Premier Kathleen Wynne spent the first part of her day on the radio, defending the Liberals’ decisions to cancel two gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga, which could cost taxpayers up to $1.1 billion.

They have 11,000 people in the hydro bureaucracy making $100,000 a year, can you believe that?

Wynne said former premier Dalton McGuinty did “what he believed was right,” but added that she has tried to rectify mistakes that she believes were made.

Campaigning later in Vaughan, north of Toronto, Wynne said hydro rates went up in large part because the government had to make massive investments to repair and upgrade Ontario’s electricity system after years of neglect.

“There’s a cost associated with that, and so we are working to make sure that there are programs and supports in place for people who are struggling to pay for their electricity,” she said. “But are we going to back away from clean, renewable energy? No, we’re not going to do that.”

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren CalabreseOntario Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne speaks in front of carpenter apprentices and other Liberal candidates during a campaign stop at the Carpenters’ Union Local 27 Training Centre in Vaughan, Ont. on Monday, May 12, 2014.

Hudak lashed out at both the Liberals and the NDP for rising electricity bills.

“A billion dollars in the gas plants scandal to save a couple Liberal seats and you folks got stuck with the bill,” he said.

“And the NDP, they’re really just the great pretenders. They say they care about hydro rates but they voted with the Liberals each and every time.”

Wynne went on the attack against Hudak’s plan to wipe out tens of thousands of public sector jobs in an effort to eliminate the $12.5-billion deficit in just two years.

“We have a plan to cut ribbons at construction sites. Tim Hudak’s plan is to cut jobs at construction sites,” she said.

“Our steady balanced approach would invest in transit, invest in infrastructure, and it invests in skills training to help the people of Ontario get good jobs.”

Hudak said he’s giving people the “hard talk and the plain truth,” while the Liberals and NDP are making promises Ontario can’t afford.

“If this were a popularity contest, you’d promise everything under the sun to all people,” he said. “I’m actually proposing some pretty tough choices, but I think we owe it to Ontarians to be honest with them about the mess that we’re in.”

— With files from Maria Babbage, Diana Mehta and Colin Perkel