Claire Hoy — ‘Congratulations, indeed’

November 29, 2013 · 0 Comments

Four years ago, Al Gore breezed into Toronto to heap praise upon then Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty’s Green Energy Act, claiming it was “widely recognized now as the single best green energy program on the North American continent.”
Well, we all know how that played out don’t we? Two years after Gore’s celebrity appearance, the independent Ontario Auditor-General’s report found the Liberals had wasted billions of tax dollars on their ill-conceived plans.
But since being a Liberal means never having to say you are sorry, Gore was back in town again last week, this time praising McGuinty’s successor Premier Kathleen Wynne for her plan to ban all coal-fired electrical power plants.
Gore – who has become a bazillionaire promoting his one-sided view of climate hysteria – congratulated Wynne for her “vision and leadership … Ontario has become the first regional jurisdiction in all of North America to take these steps on the burning of coal. Congratulations, Ontario, and thank you, Ontario,” he said.
And off we go again, another example of Liberals pushing an ideological agenda which makes no practical sense and, like McGuinty’s aforementioned act, will inevitably mean higher and higher energy costs for all Ontarians.
Congratulations, indeed.
Because of Liberal green energy plans – and not even counting the billion-dollar pre-election boondoggle of closing partially-built new plants (which Wynne, as a senior minister at the time and vice-chair of the party’s election campaign had to be aware of) – Ontario consumers are already seeing their power costs rise 10 per cent a year. They are expected to double over the next few years.
And for what? If there were some real benefits to show for this wanton waste of taxpayer’s money, that would be one thing. But the only ones who are benefitting from all this are the companies who snagged the Liberal contracts – mostly without tenders to build the solar and wind expansions.
Worse, in 2009 the Liberals promised their plan would create 50,000 jobs. Well, that has turned out to be at least 50,000 more than it actually created since the Auditor-General found there will likely be a net job loss flowing from the massive public subsidies to wind and solar companies and the resulting loss of jobs in other electrical areas.
Congratulations, indeed.
Gore – like Wynne and company – is pathologically opposed to nuclear power. Why? While wind and solar are costly and unreliable, the facts show that Ontario emissions overall turned around in the mid-1990s after our seven CANDU plants had to be closed down because of old age. At the time, Ontario recorded carbon emissions of 16 million tonnes a year, but when nuclear was replaced with coal, that shot up to 42 million in 2001. Since then, however, with nuclear back up and running, our emissions have plunged to an estimated 13 million tonnes this year. The contribution of both wind and solar to that is virtually negligible. It’s virtually all because of nuclear power.
Yet Gore, as we’ve said, condemns nukes. And Wynne, like McGuinty before her, seems happy playing Snerd to Gore’s Mortimer.
This is the same Gore who earlier this year dissed Canada’s oil sands – which really would create thousands of jobs in Ontario as well as Alberta and elsewhere at very little ecological cost – as an “open sewer.”
Gore condemns coal, oil and natural gas for destroying the planet. And he even criticized Canada – as have the Liberals – for not signing onto Kyoto. Yet when Gore was U.S. vice-president he publicly refuted Kyoto. And earlier this year he sold his Current TV network to Al Jazeera for $500 million (reportedly $70 million of it went into his own pocket). So what, you say? Well, Al Jazeera is backed by the Arab emirate of Qatar, a world leader in production of oil and natural gas. For anybody else but a Liberal, this would be hypocritical.
None of this, it seems, registers at all on Wynne. She just wants another photo op with her hero Gore.
She called her Ending Coal for Cleaner Air Act “a significant milestone.”
Actually, she should have said it’s yet another “significant millstone” around the necks of Mr. and Mrs. Beleaguered Ontario Taxpayer, because that’s exactly what this, like their previous green energy boondoggles, will turn out to be.
Congratulations, indeed.