Comments on the Globe and Mail’s Coverage of the Ontario AG vs. Gov’t Electricity Conflict

The Globe and Mail’s Matthew McClearn continues his coverage of the conflict between Ontario’s Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk and the Wynne government over how the province should report the financial impacts of its electricity mess. His new report is here. I commented on his previous article in this series, published a month ago here. McClearn’s …

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Ontario AG vs. Gov’t Electricity Conflict

In her testimony March 21 to the Public Accounts Committee, Ontario’s Auditor General (AG) Bonnie Lysyk issued findings documenting outrageously bad behaviour by the IESO management and board of directors. Since the IESO board is no longer independent, having become simply an extension of the Ministry of Energy — albeit with much higher labour rates …

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“˜We’ve allowed our power system to drift into parasitism’: Summaries for Dec. 6-7 Radio Interviews

The following notes summarize about an hour of live radio interviews on three shows (Tom McConnell, Scott Thompson, and Craig Needles) addressing the December 2017 report of the Auditor General on the IESO and also a recent report of the Market Surveillance Panel on gaming by the Goreway generating station.

Guest Post: Ontario Liberal Politics Overriding Public Safety

One of the casualties in the Ontario government’s headlong rush into green energy has been the loss of balanced, responsible environmental assessment. Here is a short summary of two recent instances where the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change (MOECC) has failed to responsibly administer environmental assessment processes and put the public at risk. For …

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Hide and Seek with ‘Fair’ Hydro Plan Costs

At the Ontario legislature’s Estimates Committee last week on Wednesday, NDP Energy Critic Peter Tabuns asked the Energy minister, the deputy minister, and OPG officials to explain an amount of $4 billion in extra financing costs that the Financial Accountability Officer attributed solely to the government’s choice of an “alternative” financing model. The fumbling responses …

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Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner Pushes the Conservation Con

rx online In March 1993, one of the defining moments in Maurice Strong’s leadership period for Ontario Hydro occurred — Strong announced the shut down the utility’s energy conservation programs. He justified his initiative noting that conservation programs during the prevailing surplus of generating capacity would harm consumers already hurting from recent rate increases. At …

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Compensation Pain (podcast)

One of the general themes of this website is to document how public policy debates over energy in Ontario don’t obviously display the collective wisdom to correctly identify even short-run cause and effect relationships. One example of this deficiency relates to labour compensation rates in the utility sector. Is executive compensation at OPG and Hydro …

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Wynne’s Version of the Ernie Eves Electricity Rate Freeze

Down in the polls, embattled over hydro rates, and about to face the voters, two Ontario premiers in recent years opted for panic-inspired electricity sector interventions that resulted in long-term harm. Just before the 2003 election, Premier Eves imposed a rate freeze that destroyed the electricity market and rang up the deficit by about a …

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