Tories looking to trash Grits’ green legacy

Ontario’s Green Energy Act hasn’t been doing much for a while but the provincial Progressive Conservatives will get as much mileage as they can out of burying it.

Former premier Dalton McGuinty treated the 2009 law as a signature accomplishment, meant to be the legal foundation for a major transformation of Ontario’s economy.

It didn’t do that.

But it did galvanize opposition to the Liberals, especially in rural Ontario.

It also was key to electricity system reforms that raised prices, and probably did more damage to the Ontario Liberal Party than any other piece of legislation in 15 years.

Energy Minister Greg Rickford and Infrastructure Minister Monte McNaughton talked in Toronto after introducing a bill to repeal the law earlier Thursday, fulfilling an election promise.

McNaughton led the attack. The Green Energy Act gave the provincial government authority to approve renewable energy projects even when nearby residents and local politicians objected, he said, and they used it for the benefit of Liberal connected lobbyists and greenpower developers.

“But the McGuinty-Wynne Liberals didn’t care one bit,” McNaughton said. “They had friends waiting to get paid, and the Green Energy Act gave them the power to trample over any local family, community group, or municipality that tried to get in their way.”

Not just Liberals, McNaughton went on. Provincial New Democrats voted for the Green Energy Act, too.

“And by the way, where were the NDP? Where were the NDP and their activist friends? Where were they when the Liberals were jamming these terrible wind and solar farms in people’s backyards? Why weren’t the NDP and their activist friends protesting and getting kicked out of the legislature on behalf of rural municipalities?

“I’ll tell you why: It’s quite clear to me that the NDP … don’t care about you. In fact, we saw time and time over the past several years that the NDP joined forces with the McGuinty Wynne Liberals to prop up and support these decisions.”

This sounds more like leftover campaign bluster than like the talk of ministers in a majority government doing the people’s business. But then, repealing the Green Energy Act is pretty symbolic now.

Wind and solar power have gone from a microscopic fraction of Ontario’s electricity supply to a small fraction: windmills provided 0.01 per cent of our power before the act a decade ago, but nearly four per cent of our power on Thursday. We’ve closed coal generating plants, drastically cutting air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions. Ontarians have much more expertise and experience in smaller-scale power projects than we did — if you’re a farmer who wants to devote some of your land to solar panels, it’s easier now than it used to be to get somebody to put them up.

But we’ve also signed longterm deals with carpetbagging renewable-energy companies that lock us in to prices much higher than the going rate. Opposition to wind farms, especially, has hardened across rural Ontario rather than subsided. The Liberals thought things would turn out if they could just get those wind farms built, so they treated wind farms the way some people would like to see the federal government treat oil and gas pipelines.

Wrong.

The Liberals signed a $9.7-billion sole-sourced deal with South Korea’s Samsung to seed a renewable-energy manufacturing industry here, but trying to retool Ontario’s manufacturing sector to turn out windmill stalks and inverters and solar cells for a thirsty global market never panned out.

We got four factories out of the Samsung agreement, two making wind power parts and two making solar equipment. Siemens closed its windmill blade factory in Tillsonburg last year; a Samsung subsidiary still has a windmill tower factory in Windsor but it’s barely hanging on. The solar power business is healthier but it’s not challenging automakers for economic clout here.

The Liberals had already abandoned the most ineffective stuff in the Green Energy Act before they lost power.

As energy minister, Ottawa’s Bob Chiarelli boasted about renegotiating the Samsung deal so we’d spend billions fewer dollars to buy much less electricity.

Under his successor Glenn Thibeault, the provincial government stopped accepting applications from small-time renewable energy producers to sell their surplus power and cancelled a whole wave of new larger-scale procurements because Ontario just doesn’t need the electricity.

As an electricity strategy, the law did some good and cost an awful lot of money. As an industrial strategy, the law did very little and cost an awful lot of money.

Repealing the law doesn’t undo any of that. The wind farms we have will stay up, monuments to good intentions.