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2018 Ontario Provincial Election Discussion

MetroMan said:
Can Wynne win in 2018?
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Yes. If she could win the last time despite the taint of McGuinty and eHealth, gas plants, Ornge, onerous and insider deals on windfarms, overspending on schools and overall waste, then she can, will likely win in 2018.

Wynne will win not because of her record, but because the Cons field such idiots as candidates.
 
Good to see some level of recognition that energy prices are too high (even if it's not entirely her fault).

However, talk needs to be followed up by action lest we want to see our manufacturers and high-tech industries expand elsewhere. The Liberals need to address the core issues (nuclear refurbishment & green energy) rather than slapping on more bandaids in the form of laws and rebates.

Premier Kathleen Wynne calls high electricity prices her ‘mistake’

OTTAWA – In a speech to party faithful at the Ontario Liberal annual general meeting today in Ottawa, Wynne says she takes responsibility “for not paying close enough attention to some of the daily stresses in Ontarians’ lives.”

She says while she is proud of the work done to remove coal from the system and ensure adequate supply, it is unacceptable that some people have to choose between paying for food and heating.

As Wynne’s personal popularity has plummeted under 20 per cent, rising hydro bills have become one of the most pressing issues for the governing party ahead of the June 2018 election.

She says she thinks her polling numbers are low because people think she’s not who they elected, and that she has become a typical politician who will “do anything to win.”

Wynne is committing to visiting every single riding between now and the election to connect with Ontarians.
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http://globalnews.ca/news/3076892/p...-electricity-prices-her-mistake/?sf42904962=1

Reevely: After an Ottawa byelection win, the deeper fear sets in for Ontario's Liberals

Ontario’s Liberals fear getting swept away by the same whirlwind that carried Donald Trump to the White House, with the worst gusts coming from high electricity prices.

They know they’re unpopular. They have believed that their well-intended efforts to look beyond short-term political advantage will start paying off in time to win re-election in 2018. And now they look at Hillary Clinton and they wonder.

They gathered at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa this weekend for their annual convention to talk about the danger they’re in. They saved Madeleine Meilleur’s old seat in Ottawa-Vanier in this past week’s byelection, which is a relief, but they got pantsed by a teenage Tory in Niagara West-Glanbrook and their provincewide poll numbers are terrible.

“We’re going into redoubling mode at this moment,” Premier Kathleen Wynne said in an onstage chat Saturday morning with Mary Kay Henry, the president of the two-million-member U.S.-based Service Employees International Union, on Saturday morning.

They have a message — that they’re preparing Ontario for the economy of the future — but they have to sell it now.

Henry sees Ontario as a beacon for progressive policies that are good for people like her nurses, public-service workers and cleaners. She and her union worked their tails off for Clinton and it didn’t work.

“We’re still trying to unpack what happened,” Henry said, Particularly in industrial states like Michigan (where Henry is from), Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which have been solid Democratic Party territory but which Clinton lost to Trump on Nov. 8. The union’s own numbers suggest that a fifth of its members voted Trump, a sign that its message that Trump has no real industry or jobs plan simply did not penetrate.

Henry talked about Obamacare, the U.S. federal health-care law that has provided health insurance to more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans … but also driven up premiums for millions of others who had insurance already. Obamacare has flaws forced into by the complicated political horsetrading it took to get anything passed by Congress, loopholes related to drug costs, any number of other quirks.

“That’s all way too complicated for the person that got their premium cheque increased,” Henry acknowledged. A price hike is a price hike.

In Ontario, “read ‘electricity rates’,” Wynne replied ruefully. “Complicated. Hard to explain.” She thought for a moment. “Needs to be fixed.”

Trump’s win is not just a sign of trouble for the Liberals; it could be a problem in itself. Ontario’s efforts to expand trade, to expand green energy, to attract high-wage employers with government help could be the right long-term policies but be damaging if the Americans go in the opposite direction. They’ll be working with governors of Great Lakes states to try to impress on the new administration how important the cross-border relationship is to U.S. prosperity.

Wynne will go on a listening tour of every riding in Ontario before the next election, she announced, and she wants Ontarians to grill her.

“I have some work to do — to prove that I am who I have always been, and that I will always work as hard as I can to do what is right for our province and what is in the best interests of the people of Ontario,” she said in a speech after the Henry talk. She’ll be starting with electricity prices.

“People have told me that they’ve had to choose between paying their electricity bill and buying food or paying the rent. That is unacceptable to me,” she said. “Our government made a mistake. It was my mistake. And I’m going to do my best to fix it.”

In the past, governments spooked by hydro prices have always resorted to short-term moves that often make no long-term sense, either freezing prices while the system decays or covering shortfalls out of the provincial treasury. On how she’ll do what she says she’ll do, Wynne had no specifics. But promised that those will come.

The Liberals here do have an advantage over the Progressive Conservatives: party unity. The Tories have to run against the Liberals together in a way Republicans didn’t absolutely have to hew to everything Donald Trump said as he ran for president.

The Tories have always been an unwieldy coalition of small-government libertarians who don’t care whom you have sex with, social conservatives who very much do, and rural populists who are OK with government activism as long as it means things like new highways.

In last week’s two byelections, they gained a homeschooled teenager in one riding and failed to elect a deeply experienced former provincial ombudsman in another.

Just about the only thing Niagara winner Sam Oosterhoff and Ottawa loser André Marin had in common besides a party banner was a belief that electricity prices are too high. Guys like Oosterhoff are “a threat to the party,” Marin says, poison to the Tories’ chances in urban ridings they have to win. Liberals in Ottawa gleefully shared that around here on the weekend.

Say what you like about Kathleen Wynne’s “activist centrism,” the idea that the government should aim to help everyone in their daily lives. It’s expensive, it’s intrusive, it’s ineptly applied, it’s dreamed up by people who get anxious when they’re out of sight of the CN Tower. OK. It is at least a coherent vision of what government is for and Wynne doesn’t have to sell it to her fellow Liberals.

She’ll take any advantage she can get.
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http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...the-deeper-fear-sets-in-for-ontarios-liberals
 
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jje1000 said:
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...the-deeper-fear-sets-in-for-ontarios-liberals
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"They gathered at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa this weekend for their annual convention to talk about the danger they’re in. They saved Madeleine Meilleur’s old seat in Ottawa-Vanier in this past week’s byelection, which is a relief, but they got pantsed by a teenage Tory in Niagara West-Glanbrook and their provincewide poll numbers are terrible."​

Both the Conservatives and Liberals got pantsed by a teenage independent. I'm not sure the Liberals are particularly worried about an individual who has viewpoints considered extreme by the Conservatives themselves.
 
rbt said:
"They gathered at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa this weekend for their annual convention to talk about the danger they’re in. They saved Madeleine Meilleur’s old seat in Ottawa-Vanier in this past week’s byelection, which is a relief, but they got pantsed by a teenage Tory in Niagara West-Glanbrook and their provincewide poll numbers are terrible."​

Both the Conservatives and Liberals got pantsed by a teenage independent. I'm not sure the Liberals are particularly worried about an individual who has viewpoints considered extreme by the Conservatives themselves.
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In the end, who would have been a bigger problem for the PCs: Morin (many Tories are privately happy he lost) or the homeschooler?
 
No easy fixes for high hydro bills- and at least four out of the five are directly because of the Liberals.

The only ways off the top of my head of solving the issue would be to artificially subsidize energy rates (not likely possible due to provincial debt), reduce costs at the OPG (not easily done due to to unions) and to extend the reach of the OEB (only preventative for future increases).

Maybe it might be possible to eat the costs upfront and cancel energy contracts with the smaller producers?

Why hydro bills are so high in Ontario
Kathleen Wynne admits high electricity prices are 'her mistake,' but fixing things won't be easy
By Mike Crawley, CBC News Posted: Nov 22, 2016 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Nov 22, 2016 10:22 AM ET

[...]

Yet "fixing" high hydro prices is no easy task.

"It's not a simple system, it is a complex system," Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault said Monday, when pressed by reporters for specifics about the premier's weekend promise "to find more ways to lower rates and reduce the burden on consumers."

Thibeault is ruling out another taxpayer-funded subsidy beyond the promised rebate of the provincial portion of the HST (eight per cent), starting in January.

So that means chipping away at the factors that actually drive costs in the hydro system.

Here are the key reasons why your hydro bills are so high and why it'll be a challenge for the Wynne government to lower them enough that you notice.

1. Oversupply of power
Ontario's electricity producers are generating more power than we consume in the province. But the government is locked into contracts to purchase that power regardless. It sells off the excess to the U.S., at rates below the cost of production. And even though you aren't consuming that power, you still have to pay for your share of it every month (through a line on your power bill called the "global adjustment").

"This dynamic is made worse because demand keeps falling," said Greenpeace energy campaigner Shawn-Patrick Stensil. "Covering the cost of this excess surplus supply is spread over fewer kilowatt hours." He argues the government could solve the excess power problem in one stroke by taking the entire Pickering nuclear station offline.

Cancelling power contracts seems an easy solution — but not a cheap one: remember it cost $1 billion to cancel those infamous gas-fired power plants in Mississauga and Oakville.

2. Pricey green energy
Wind, solar and bio-energy account for 6.3 per cent of total electricity generated in the province, but 16.3 per cent of the total generation cost, according to the auditor general's recent investigation into hydro prices. Auditor Bonnie Lysyk criticized the government for offering overly generous contracts when it launched its big green energy push in 2009. Despite shifting gears to a competitive bidding process, the auditor found that in 2014, Ontario was still paying "double the market price for wind and 3½ times the market price for solar energy."

3. Weakened energy watchdog
The Ontario Energy Board is the independent body that regulates electricity pricing in the province, but not all electricity pricing. It has little ability to control the price paid to electricity generators, other than Ontario Power Generation's nuclear plants at Pickering and Darlington and most of OPG's hydroelectric dams. Anytime OPG wants to increase these prices, it has to seek approval from the board.

But the OEB does not have that power over private producers. They negotiate prices directly with the government and have negotiated some rather profitable contracts, since that is their motive. They now account for about half of all the electricity generated in Ontario, therefore a significant chunk of your hydro bill is out of the reach of the regulator that's supposed to protect the interests of consumers.

4. Time of use pricing
Ontario brought in smart meters to allow for variable pricing of electricity during the day, with the aim of driving down consumption during times of high use by raising the prices substantially during those peak periods. The move has had little effect on peak demand, according to an analysis commissioned by the government's Independent Electricity System Operator. It means that we're still consuming plenty of electricity during those peak periods, and paying a lot more for it than before smart meters arrived.

5. Well-paid hydro workers
The latest edition of the Sunshine List includes 7,632 employees of Ontario Power Generation. Their earnings total $1.07 billion. The last time Hydro One workers were on the Sunshine List (in 2014), there were 4,279 employees, with salaries totalling $550 million. The auditor general flagged in 2013 that generous salaries, pensions and benefits at OPG — especially among top executives — were partly to blame for rising hydro prices.
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-hydro-bills-1.3860314
 
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This dude hasn't paid a hydro bill in his life but he is whining about hydro costs. Typical politician. He will fit right in at Queens Park.
 
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