Terence Corcoran provides a useful survey of McGuinty’s legacy. In the context of that survey, he introduces my column based on some of the ideas presented in Part 5 of this series. Both columns have attracted comments from advocates for higher electricity prices.
I should have noted in Part 5 that what I described a busy work for bureaucrats, merging the OPA and the IESO, is officially over with the death of Bill 75 as a result of prorogation. Bill 75 was a long, costly journey that only gets you to where you started, all the poorer for it. It is cheery to think that the death of Bill 75 is the first step of what will hopefully become an widespread freeze on McGuinty’s electricity initiatives. If anyone has any information to offer on cost impacts from Bill 75 incurred to date, please share.
I am very excited to report that with the support of two generous donors we are now working with a contractor to complete the project of converting the government’s document dump into searchable documents. We expect to have all 56,000 pages of the government’s document disclosure converted soon. We have fallen behind in posting the original documents, dedicating our efforts instead to getting the material into searchable format.
The next step for the Gas Busters series is getting that searchable data loaded onto a web site with the necessary capacity, accessibility, and security architecture. We are in the process of specifying resources meeting those requirements. That step appears to have a price tag of $4,000. Please donate.
Great work Tom. How do we donate? Is there a donation button somewhere?
We were commissioning a PayPal system but had put that on hold to focus on doing two key steps — making the documents searchable and building the infrastructure to make them accessible and secure. Please communicate with me directly through the contact button to financially support this effort. If you can donate internet services that might be useful, that would be very helpful too.
The automated PayPal donation tab is now working. You can also donate the old fashioned way by contacting me directly. Thanks.
I assume for transparency sake you will be posting who your donors are.
Tom’s made a previous comment on transparency … not sure it matters to me … why don’t you get the ball rolling by signing your comments with your real name ?
Donors get a complete report of costs, donations, and commitments. Donors who positively allow disclosure are reported and requests for anonymity or silence on the point from donors is respected.
Good call Mr. Sharp: Transparency is something that seems to escape people that have something they are not convinced should apply to them-only to others. Kind of like comeclean.ca a product of Environmental Defence, OSEA, Pembina, CAPE, Sierra Club, and a few others during the runup to the Provincal election in 2011 pushing clean energy jobs. They advocated for the FIT program but now they have simply disappeared. A clear demonstration of transparency in their eyes. Create a facade and hide behind it while you make noises, then run like hell. There are many more of those with the most obvious being “Working Families”. Ya, whats your name and come clean on who you represent!
Thanks Parker. I’m not necessarily reading anything (too) nefarious into the comment, I’ve just gotten a little sick of screen names. They can be useful in allowing people to disclose helpful information that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to but people often hide behind them. So, my thinking is that if you’re even going to just ask a question with an edge to it, you should be prepared to identify yourself … and if you skitter away — never to be heard from again — or just stay in the shadows, folks can draw their own conclusions.