Growth and jobs are being created by oil and gas, not wind and solar
When Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan addressed the Economic Club of Canada on Monday, his only reference to energy was to how much more of it he now had, thanks to shedding 54 pounds of lard. Among provincial policies that badly need some liposuction are those relating to green energy.
It will be intriguing to see how Don Drummond’s report on Broader Public Sector Reform, which is due to be released Wednesday, will deal with this issue.
Although it doesn’t involve a direct hit to the treasury, Ontario’s leap into the cul-de-sac technologies of wind and solar has loaded hefty and unnecessary costs onto consumers via feed-in tariffs, and thus damaged growth prospects and future tax revenue.
Mr. Duncan had the gall to suggest on Monday that “Protected domestic markets have been replaced by open markets and global competition.” In fact, the Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty has created a highly protected market for alternative-energy equipment, leading to a complaint last August before the World Trade Organization by the European Union (talk about the pot calling the kettle black). Meanwhile, Japan challenged the provisions of the feed-in tariff in 2010.
Ironically, Mr. Drummond was himself involved in promoting the fantasy of cost-free — even economically boosting — adherence to radical environmental agendas when, while still at TD Bank in 2009, he paid for a report on the regional impacts of climate-change policy in Canada. Mr. Drummond channelled the money to leading climate-policy wonk Mark Jaccard through the Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute, hardly the organizations to which one would turn for objectivity on climate, or indeed any environmental matter. The resultant report carried the Pollyanna-ish title: “Climate leadership, economic prosperity.”
Mr. Drummond told the Post at the time that Mr. Jaccard and the two radical environmental NGOs had technical expertise and credible models, and yet among the reasons for action quoted by the report was the U.K. Stern review, a blatant exercise in cooking the economic books. (One item that Finance Minister Duncan and super-bureaucrat Stern have in common is a belief in vegetables. The former subscribed to greater personal intake as a route to weight loss; Lord Stern suggested that locavore vegetarianism might save the world from self-incineration.)
