The Record.com (Waterloo)
March 12, 2007

After being in power almost four years, Premier Dalton McGuinty and his Liberals should have a real plan in place to deal with Ontario’s energy needs and, in particular, the province’s coal-fired electricity plants.

But, for reasons that are not clear, the government seems to be stumbling along, not able to gets its energy file in order. The latest example of the confusion arose last week when the premier was discussing how his government would spend the $586 million the federal government has pledged to give Ontario for climate-change initiatives. McGuinty said the government would not use the money to clean up the province’s coal plants.

Well, fine, the government can use the money for other purposes – but when and how is it going to deal with the coal-fired plants?

Basically, the government has to choose one of three options: It may continue to use the pollution-producing plants; it could convert the plants so that they burn cleanly and do not emit harmful gases, or it could close them and rely upon other forms of electricity including, perhaps, nuclear power.

Nothing the premier said has shown the government is ready to make the hard choices that sooner or later will have to be made.

Tom Adams of Energy Probe, the energy research group, went to the heart of the problem when he said scrubbers to clean emission from the coal stations may not be a bad idea.

He said that getting rid of the coal-fired plants has been official government policy since the 1980s, but they are still around. If, in fact, the province can’t do without them, the government might as well acknowledge this reality and set its policy on a firm, realistic foundation.

McGuinty could hardly deny that his own party has not been as realistic as it should have been. During the 2003 election campaign, the Liberals pledged to close the coal stations by 2007. That’s this year. That’s a pledge they couldn’t keep. In 2005, they said they would not shut down the Nanticoke station until 2009, but they subsequently had to acknowledge that deadline was also too optimistic.

Unless this government can produce a clear plan quickly, the Liberals will go into the fall election campaign saddled with the allegation that they have not shown sufficient leadership on energy matters.

This won’t be good for the Liberals. More important, it won’t be good for Ontario.

The energy file needs more attention than the Liberals have given it so far.