So you just defend stupidity by the liberals saying that everyone would engage in it?
No, what I'm saying is that you're using it to single out and scapegoat a specific party. I also don't consider the refurbishment and good maintenance of nuclear power plants to be "stupidity".
I think the issue is the liberals did not care what the cost of hydro was for the average person and only cared when the polls showed they will lose an election over this issue.
No, they care, but there were valid reasons for raising rates. We had growth in our power requirements, with little growth in our ability to supply such power. We had NIMBYs complaining about the locations of gas power plants and turbines who slowed down our ability to meet those requirements. Supply has been outmatched by demand. Therefore, prices go up; that's basic economic theory.
But, if you'd really like to go into it, the Harris-era deregulation of power companies in Ontario and splitting of Ontario Hydro have caused the rates to go up beyond the cost of inflation. This isn't a new phenomena. The NDP had frozen electricity prices and the PCs unfroze them in anticipation of selling off Hydro One ("Potential Buyers! We've made it so that you can raise rates and make more money!"). Ernie Eves smartened up and cancelled the Hydro One IPO under immense public backlash. But the freeze wasn't reinstated. Though now we had deregulation, competition for power supply and unfixed rates, which (as with most localized oligopolies) lead to higher rates (not lower). Skip forward ten years and we need to build new plants and our old ones need refurbishment and rates need to go up even more because. Throw in a minority government here are there and suddenly the idea of doing anything to raise tax rates that might cover those costs (especially with a "taxes are evil" mentality amongst the public and) the Liberals have little choice but raise rates; At least that way, the biggest users of peak power (industry) are paying the brunt of the costs.
What the Liberals should've done in the past decade-plus is buy back all hydro production and supply and reinstate Ontario Hydro. But they didn't. And the only party likely to have done that was the NDP, but they haven't come close to running the province since the populace unfairly blamed them for a global recession and gave them the boot. And what the Liberals should not have done is crib the Hudak plan of selling off part of Hydro One to subsidize hydro prices. Big mistake, because investors want returns and the government loses out on dividends. But again, PC or Liberal government, we'd be in the same position.
I think what you fail to realize is no one cares if the price was going to go up, it is that the liberals did nothing for over a decade to stop the price increases and made the price increases worse then expected.
You're oversimplifying. The Liberals did institute the Ontario Energy Board to regulate utility rates. But by that point, the cat was already out of the bag, and regulating the new private companies (licensed suppliers like Bullfrog, Direct Energy, etc.) too much also meant potentially forcing them out of business (bad for jobs, bad for PR, bad for attracting business in general). So capitulations were made. Private competition also meant that government owned power supply ends up supplying less people and reducing income for the province and reducing economies of scale.
I'm not trying to scapegoat the Conservatives here, but the fact of the matter is most of the major problems with Hydro today all lead back to what Harris did to Ontario Hydro.
Sure, the Liberals could've done *more* by returning things to the way they once were, but that would not have been a very easy task, monetarily or politically. Hell, we've had well over a decade of people crying to privatize the LCBO, which makes well over a billion a year in pure profit for the province; money that goes to pay for the services you and I use every day. Yet people still want to sell it off so that they can spend $0.05 less on a bottle of beer. So, let's just say the political climate right now is pretty chilly on publicly owned companies.
So please, other than criticizing and demonizing, can you offer an actual solution?
