These bureaucracies aren’t accountable to the public — most members of the public couldn’t even tell you what these bureaucracies do. No, these bureaucracies serve their political masters instead of their customers. The latest example of how government ownership works to the detriment of the greater good came just last week in Oakville, where the McGuinty government decided to cancel an unpopular power plant, for fear that it would otherwise lose a seat in the next election.

The McGuinty government has not yet owned up to the cost of that cancellation but some reports indicate it could reach hundreds of millions, and all to keep the Liberals from losing a single seat. This is but one example of the politicization of the power system, and but one reason that our power rates have been soaring.

Of course, that Oakville power plant should never have been ordered in the first place — it was the result of another political decision, a grand-standing decision to replace the province’s entire fleet of coal plants in favour of windmills and other forms of renewable energy. The windmills not only cost several times as much as coal, they are also unavailable most of the time, because the wind doesn’t blow on demand. To provide backup when the wind doesn’t blow, the citizens of Oakville were told they would need to live with a power plant for a neighbour.

Ladies and gentlemen, until today, I have failed to vigorously defend our province’s coal-generating stations — some of which are among the cleanest on the continent — and I have failed to vigorously attack the entirely unjustified wind and solar projects that are bankrupting our province.

I have also played the same game that my political opponents have played, by picking my own favourites — nuclear and hydroelectricity — as deserving of subsidies.

No longer. I am here to say that, if elected premier, I will not shut down our perfectly viable coal plants, I will not subsidize one more windmill or solar collector or nuclear reactor or hydroelectric plant. Instead of pretending that I and my party can pick better winners in the electricity business, I will let Ontario households and Ontario businesses choose by finishing the privatization that Mike Harris began. Once the power system is privatized, competing companies will be free to produce all the electricity from wind, solar, nuclear, coal — what have you — that Ontarians are willing to buy, as long as the power producers do it on their own dime, without subsidies of any kind.

I have come to the decision to put my faith in an electricity market free of politics after watching what happens when politicians call the shots. In the UK, the government has been piling on one green tax after another in pursuit of its vision of a so-called green energy future. Those taxes finally broke the citizenry. The British call it “fuel poverty” — some five million British citizens are now receiving welfare because they can’t meet their electricity payments, and the number on the dole is rising. Last week, the U.K.’s government regulator announced that, because of so-called green taxes, power rates would be rising another £769 a year, to bring the annual residential power bill to £2000. In Canadian dollars, we’re talking an annual price hike of $1,240, and an annual power bill of $3,200.

Thanks to our own Green Energy Act, fuel poverty has now come to Ontario, too. Several weeks ago, the McGuinty government announced that more than half of all the citizens of Northern Ontario will be receiving welfare payments to help them meet their energy bill. At about the same time, the government put senior citizens on the energy dole, too.

Europe has other lessons for us, too. The more that countries went green, the harder they fell. In Spain, the biggest green subsidizer of all, every green job that the government created cost more than two jobs elsewhere in the economy. Spain’s unemployment rate is now 20%, the highest in the developed world. To rescue its economy, it is slashing its green subsidies, leading to a wave of green companies filing for bankruptcy. Other European countries are also bailing out of this so-called green economy, in good part because their governments are discovering that industrial wind farms aren’t necessarily environmental. They gobble up farm land, destroy birds by the thousands, and pollute communities with noise. Because of community opposition, the largest grass-roots movement in the western world is no longer anti-nuclear but anti-wind.

To add insult to injury, even the one environmental benefit touted for wind — reduced greenhouse gas emissions — has proved a mirage. Our own Ontario Power Authority states that an aggressive program of building wind farms would actually increase our greenhouse gases emissions because of the fossil fuel backup that it would require.

This takes me to my final promise this morning. Until today, I have pussy-footed around in my criticism of the Green Energy Act. No longer. If elected, I will repeal The Green Energy Act as well as privatizing the power sector. I will end the politicization and bring Ontario back from the brink.

Financial Post, October 13, 2010, Lawrence Solomon

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the author of The Deniers.