Post by Alan BakerOrnge
Ontario’s publicly funded air ambulance service has been under fire for
almost two years over sky-high salaries, financial irregularities and
corruption allegations. A legislative committee has been probing the
service’s complex structures and pay scales in detail, and opposition
parties have been alleging wrongdoing with nearly every revelation. The
auditor general has criticized the governing Liberals for failing to
oversee Ornge, despite giving it $730 million over five years and allowing
it to borrow another $300 million. The Liberals insist Ornge went rogue
with a web of for-profit companies and questionable business deals, as
well as exorbitant salaries and lavish expenses.
Cancelled gas plants
Scandal has swirled around the government’s decision to cancel the
construction of two Toronto-area gas plants ahead of the 2011 election, in
which the government then led by Dalton McGuinty was reduced to minority
status. The cancellation costs have now been pegged at $1.1 billion, but
opposition parties have accused the Liberals of actively trying to cover
up that figure. Ontario’s privacy commissioner has concluded that staff
working for McGuinty and a former energy minister broke the law by
deleting emails pertaining to the project. Ontario Provincial Police are
also investigating the document deletions, seizing government computers at
both Queen’s Park and beyond.
eHealth
The provincial agency was given a $1-billion budget to develop electronic
health records, but wound up building themselves a bad reputation. A lot
of the eHealth money went for untendered contracts given to highly paid
consultants who then billed taxpayers for additional expenses in a scandal
that cost former health minister David Caplan his job. In 2009, the
auditor general said the agency had very little progress to show for its
efforts, and opposition parties have alleged further financial
mismanagement since then."
Windsor Parkway
The government has taken heat for not immediately acting when it learned a
$1.4-billion infrastructure project didn’t live up to safety standards.
The Liberals were told that questionable materials were being used on the
support beams on Windsor’s Herb Gray Parkway in December 2012, but didn’t
halt the project until July. More than 500 support beams are being
replaced by the project overseer at no cost to the tax payers, but the NDP
has accused the Wynne government of trying to cover up the affair and only
backing down when threatened with media exposure.
PanAm Games
Premier Kathleen Wynne has hailed the 2015 games as a cause for
celebration, but opposition parties call it just another scandal. The
$1.4-billion budget for the games does not include some key expenses, like
the $700 million athletes’ village. The government has also come under
fire for $7 million worth of bonuses paid out to 64 executives."
<http://globalnews.ca/news/1307743/5-scandals-likely-to-haunt-the-liberals-during-ontario-election/>
Since then, there's been:
= MaRS
http://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2014/08/07/star_finds_taxpayerfunded_mars_math_doesnt_quite_add_up.html
It is now run by a civil servant who earns more than half a million dollars
a year. More than a third of its 100 employees earn more than $100,000
annually.
MaRS is housed in several buildings on College St., one of which is nearly
empty, and the provincial auditor is probing a $234-million government loan
to MaRS that the organization is having trouble repaying because the
expected high-end tenants are not leasing space.
= Smart Meters
http://www.thestar.com/business/2014/12/09/smart_meters_have_few_benefits_for_big_costs_ag_report.html
But Lysyk said the pricing system has had only “a modest impact on reducing
peak demand” among householders and “no impact at all on energy
conservation.”
Among her findings:
- Smart meters were supposed to cost $1 billion. In fact, the total cost
will be double that amount.
- The energy ministry grossly over-estimated the benefits of the smart meter
program. It figured the benefit would be $600 million over 15 years. But it
forgot to include a yearly inflationary increase of $50 million. That
reduces the net benefit of the huge project to $88 million over 15 years.
- The cost of smart meters varied wildly among Ontario’s 73 local utilities,
which paid from a low of $88 per meter to a high of $544.
- Energy bureaucrats have bamboozled consumers for years by hiding the true
costs of energy in a catch-all fee called the “global adjustment” that now
makes up the majority of the cost of energy.
Lysyk said that neither the energy ministry nor the Ontario Energy Board —
which is supposed to protect ratepayers — did a cost-benefit analysis of
smart meters before plunging ahead with the program, first estimated in 2005
to cost $1 billion.
= Hydro pensions
http://www.torontosun.com/2014/08/05/public-zapped-by-hydro-pension-plans
It’s frightening that every time anyone who knows how to add looks at public
pension plans in Ontario’s electricity sector, they freak out.
So should taxpayers and hydro consumers, because they’re contributing $5 for
every $1 provincial employees at Hydro One and Ontario Power Generation
contribute to their pension plans.
The latest bad news comes in a report prepared for Premier Kathleen Wynne’s
government that the Liberals did their best to bury.
Finished in March, they held it until after the June election, then released
it last Friday on the finance ministry’s web site, heading into the long
weekend.
This is standard operating procedure when a government wants to bury bad
news.
The report, prepared by consultant Jim Leech, former CEO of the Ontario
Teachers’ Pension Plan, found Hydro One and OPG pensions are “far from
sustainable” because they are overly “generous, expensive and inflexible”,
even when compared to other pension plans in the public sector.
= Gas Plant Cover-up
http://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2014/12/23/liberals_to_repay_11000_allegedly_paid_to_wipe_computers.html
Under pressure from opposition parties, the Liberals have pledged to repay
$10,000 billed to taxpayers for the alleged scrubbing of computer hard
drives in former premier Dalton McGuinty’s office.
Premier Kathleen Wynne announced the move Tuesday in the wake of Ontario
Provincial Police revelations about the payment, uncovered in an 18-month
probe of deleted documents in the $1.1-billion gas plants scandal.
= More Pan Am Games
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/panamgames/2014/12/12/pan_am_games_expense_claims_include_wine_tour_flowers.html
From pricey dress shirts and South American wine to tiny boxes of Smarties,
organizers of next summer’s Pan Am Games are again under fire for
questionable expenses after releasing 5,000 pages of receipts.
“There were some items in there . . . that did not pass a common sense
test,” TO2015 chief Saad Rafi acknowledged Friday, unable to explain some
of the claims that filled a banker’s box.
= Green energy
http://www.torontosun.com/2014/11/08/wynnes-billion-dollar-hydro-boondoggle
Titled: “October, 2014, Ontario’s breath-taking, record-breaking month for
electricity bills”, Parker and Luft reveal that last month, Premier Kathleen
Wynne’s Liberal government paid $1 billion more for electricity than the
market value of that power.
“In October, wind power generators produced almost 600,000 MWh of
electricity at a cost of $81 million and additionally were paid another $11
million for 100,000 MWh that they could have produced, but were asked not to
add to the grid.
“Due to the glut of power in October, Ontario sold this power to
neighbouring jurisdictions at an average of 4.31 per MWh, or $2.6 million,
meaning a loss of almost $90 million for Ontario electricity users.”
“Wind and solar power systems provide less than 4% of Ontario’s power but
account for 20% of the cost paid by Ontarians, yet the government wants to
triple the number of wind and solar generators. That’s a good deal for wind
and solar producers but a raw deal for consumers.”
And to top it off, the two government agencies that are supposed to be on
the public's side are having a turf war:
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/12/01/ontario_ombudsman_accuses_auditor_general_of_perilous_power_play.html
