*if you consider power costs a good thing, that is.
Indeed, good things could grow in Ontario soil, at least if the farmland wasn’t instead built over so as to grow shitty Milennials in boring suburban tract housing. But instead of being useful Ontario elected the walking victim complex Kathleen Wynne to the Premiership and ensured that their government would be shit. After overbuilding the power grid and forbidding cities to speak out against the hare-brained idea, Wynne then opted to sell Hydro One to reduce the debt that they just can’t seem to stop adding to.
In effect, Wynne has spent Ontario’s money to encourage the overproduction of power in Ontario, then sold the utility that collects that money and expected things to be fine. Of course, they aren’t fine – Ontarians are now in a position where they’re paying more for less power. The stated reason? We aren’t using enough power. I wish I was joking. Nothing to do with overproduction, nothing to do with privatization, nothing to do with mismanagement, nothing to do with the above-market prices that weren’t watched properly, and certainly nothing to do with subsidizing non-starter caker business. No, friends. It’s your fault for not buying enough overpriced power.
The attitudes of this are absolutely incredible. The government is closing reviews of energy projects, the whole power system was described in December as “broken” by the Auditor-General, and we’ve been eating higher power costs seemingly by the month as various confounding subsidies and rate mechanisms appear and disappear. Oh, and did I mention that a worthless caker is getting $4 million a year to “control” this disaster? Obviously the solution to this political thorn was to privatize and thus to stop listing Hydro One salaries! Disclosure laws on perhaps the single most price-inelastic item most consumers buy as delivered through a virtual monopoly aren’t needed, right?
That’s not even beginning to explore the hideous disaster that was the smart meter, a shambolic excuse for a program that effectively masks the amount of power a user has actually consumed. In exchange for this lack of transparency, you’ll get some amazing deals! Like fire risks, which forced the Liberals to disconnect 45,000 of the damnable things. Just think of all you can do with a box that dictates how broke you are this month by way of an unreliable signal that forces yet more to go offline! And you could get hacked, which could damage the entire grid! All this for a system that cost $2 billion and that didn’t work for 1 in 6 on its first go-round.
That Canada’s shitty Internet impinges on implementing a shitty, shady system is raw comedy, but it’s far from the icing on the caker Liberal’s make-believe green dream. Think of all of the money handed to shitty caker businesses – make-work solar farms like Eclipsall Energy paid their workers just 20% more than minimum wage in 2011, shitty crony companies taking 90% of the provided subsidies for wind turbine production, violating international trade law, paying anywhere from two to four times the market price for solar and wind power, converting a coal plant to a biomass facility that apparently needs Norwegian wood chips despite Northern Ontario being fairly well-known for being near a small tract of land called the Boreal Forest (I bet those wood chips magic their way here – no way is shipping biomass a source of pollution!), and on it goes. Endless handouts and handups to ineffective and shitty business – that’s the Queen’s Park way.
But we’re supposed to cheer because it’s green energy you guys! Feels trump thought! Don’t think about it! In no way does this colossal fuckup make people less willing to accept and agree to future ecological reform, no way. People tend to dislike getting burned twice; the logic on Ontario’s streets is not “when Ontario tried this the power bills got jacked faster than a roids-riddled hockeymans – let’s do it again!” No sir, the endless and mindless construction of turbines is creating nothing but fans of green energy out of the Ontarian populace.
I can’t wait for #RealChange to follow Evil Orville’s crackling, brimstone-stinking footsteps!
Shit About Canada 