It took a long time, but the Ontario electorate spoke decisively on June 7, 2018.
For 15 years the people of Ontario have subjected themselves to ideological abuse by a left-leaning Liberal government.
Dalton McGinty was elected in 2003 and decided that he would save the planet by introducing his “Green Energy Act”.
He immediately set about shutting down Ontario’s coal-fired generation plants and put in place a plan that would replace cheap coal-fired electricity with expensive renewable energy from wind turbines and solar farms.
He even passed legislation that prevented rural municipalities from objecting to where wind generators would be located.
The end result of this initiative was an economic disaster.
What boggles the mind about this disaster is that neither the government nor the people seemed to recognize that Ontario was headed for an economic disaster.
The implementation of this act caused the price of electricity to skyrocket forcing many manufacturing businesses to leave the province for the U.S.
Electricity is a main input cost for many manufacturing processes. This resulted in the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs. It also resulted in a decrease of demand for electric power, and now there was a surplus of power.
The renewable power producers were still getting the agreed contract price for their power, so this forced the government to sell the surplus power to the U.S. at a fire sale price.
Renewable power requires conventional generation as a backup.
These Liberal governments have caused Ontario to now have the largest per capita debt of any sub-sovereign jurisdiction in the world. It will cost the current and future people of Ontario, and to some extent the rest of us in Canada, hundreds of billions of dollars.
Doug Ford and his new government will have a huge challenge to straighten out this mess.
The real question is why did it take the people of Ontario 15 years to wake up to the corruption and incompetence that was happening?
I think it had to do with the alternative. The alternative was a series of red Tory leaders that appeared to be not much different. In other words, they were liberal light. They were caught up with the same climate change dogma as the liberals.
As I have written before, meteorological and geological research scientists have actually proven that C02 emissions have never been the cause of climate change.
There are two kinds of Tories, red Tories and blue Tories. Red Tories believe in government intervention just like liberals. They think the government should provide basic services like child support, daycare etc. as a direct government program rather than tax credits where people have the freedom to choose.
The Harper government initiated a system of tax credits so people could choose to make their own decisions on what government support they wanted to access.
Blue Tories believe that people should have the freedom to make their own choices.
While Ford is the leader of the Ontario “Progressive” Conservative Party, he is a blue Tory. He has set himself apart from the old ‘rank and file’ PC’s. The people have recognized he will champion the real change that is so badly needed. He is certain to make choices that will upset the environmental left.
The real financial anchor that Liberal and NDP governments have imposed on Canadians is the carbon tax. The rate is not high enough to be a real disincentive for energy consumption; the rate would have to be about five times as high to be a disincentive, it is simply a tax grab made to look like an environmental necessity.
Ontario used to be the economic engine of Canada before the liberals became government. Under the leadership of Doug Ford, I think the province can be an economic leader again.
by Herman Schwenk
