Liberals withholding information, says MPP

Hundreds of millions of dollars wasted, says Leone

by Bill Jackson, The Cambridge Times

Cambridge MPP Rob Leone has been front and centre at Queen’s Park this week after moving a motion in the Ontario legislature that could find Energy Minister Chris Bentley in contempt of parliament.

Leone contends the Liberal government is withholding information pertaining to the cancellation of power plants in Liberal ridings of Oakville (in 2010), and Mississauga last year, 11 days before the provincial election. MPP Brad Duguid was energy minister at the time.

The government has admitted that the cost of cancelling the Oakville gas plant is approximately $40 million and that cancelling the Mississauga gas plant, which was already under construction, will cost $190 million.

Premier Dalton McGuinty said his government has developed plans for 17 gas power plants.

“Two of them we did not get right,” he said. “There are costs associated with their relocations. We take responsibility for that. We think it’s right for us to listen to communities when they express their concerns.”

According to Leone, Bentley was called before the Standing Committee on Estimates two months ago where he testified the decision to cancel the Mississauga power plant was made by the Liberal campaign team.

“This is a government that put the plants where they did,” Leone said. “They sited them there. They had a reason to do that…and the reality is when they thought they were going to lose seats in Mississauga and Toronto and in Oakville, they started to change channels.”

Leone charges that the decisions comprise one of the most costly “seat saving programs” in Canadian history and he has been pushing for details into the true cost of the decisions for months.

On Monday, after being found in breach of parliamentary privilege by Speaker of the legislature Dave Levac earlier this month, Bentley was forced to hand over 36,000 pages of documents pertaining to the closure of the Mississauga and Oakville power plants. Opposition party members say that some documents are incomplete and reveal additional costs for generators and need for power line infrastructure.

The power plant planned for Oakville is being moved to Napanee and the one planned for Mississauga will be built in Sarnia. Many critics expect that the cost of cancelling the gas plants and moving them will be much more than $230 million. Combined, Leone expects it will cost almost $650 million dollars.

The documents provided contain no emails from the Liberal campaign team and no emails from former minister of energy, Brad Duguid, noted Leone. The former minister is not cited in any documents.

“No one in this legislature requested partial documents, or blacked out documents. We requested all documents, and that clearly isn’t what we have been given.”

All legislative business grinded to a halt on Tuesday and debate on Leone’s motion of contempt continued into Wednesday.

Leone said the issue was of interest to him because Cambridge was potentially one of the sites where a gas power plant could be located.

At the very least, the money wasted could have been used to fund much-needed hospital expansion, MRIs or cancer treatment, he believes.

“This is a government that’s spent hundreds of millions of dollars when energy prices are going up as a result of the decisions they’ve made, not only in power plant locations, but the Green Energy Act.”