Ontario Liberal government
OPP allege charges of criminal breach of trust former McGuinty staffer
Police allege criminal breach of trust against McGuinty chief of staff over gas plants scandal
The OPP allege that David Livingston, former chief of staff to Dalton McGuinty, committed criminal breach of trust in giving an outside tech expert access to 24 computers in the premier’s office.
OTTAWA — Police are pursuing a criminal charge of breach of trust against the right-hand man of former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty in an investigation sparked by the controversy over deleted gas plant emails.
Authorities say they believe McGuinty’s former chief of staff, David Livingston, gave an outside tech expert access to 24 computers in the premier’s office — access it’s suspected was used to permanently delete information.
By allowing someone who was not an Ontario Public Service employee to alter government computers, police allege, Livingston breached the public trust.
And while just what exactly the outside expert may have done to the computers in the premier’s office is not fully known, police now have two dozen hard drives in hand and are trying to see if they can figure it out.
The case against Livingston is detailed in the “information to obtain” (ITO) Ontario Provincial Police used last month to request a search warrant for a storage facility in Mississauga, where the government hard drives were being stored.
Some of the allegations are being made public for the first time after the Citizen and other media went to court to have the police document unsealed.
The accusations have not been tested in court, but a judge has ruled it is in the public interest to make them known.
Police allege that during the transition period after McGuinty had resigned from office under a cloud of allegations over the cancellation of gas plants in Mississauga and Oakville, Livingston arranged to get special computer access so that one user would be able to access the computer profiles of the entire premier’s office.
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European countries tearing up renewables contracts (and you can too, Bob)
Europe tearing up renewable energy contracts (you can too, Bob)
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| Idyllic isn’t it? Also not the truth. |
Governments rip up renewable contracts
More from Special to Financial Post
Companies ‘do not have a right [to expect the compensation] not to be changed’
Governments across Europe, regretting the over-generous deals doled out to the renewable energy sector, have begun reneging on them. To slow ruinous power bills hikes, governments are unilaterally rewriting contracts and clawing back unseemly profits.
In Italy, one of Europe’s largest economies and one that lavished billions in subsidies on the renewable sector, the government in 2013 applied its so-called “Robin Hood tax” to renewable energy producers. Under the new rule, renewable energy producers with more than €3 million in revenue and income greater than €300,000 must now pay a tax of 10.5%.
That follows a 2012 move to charge all solar producers a five cent tax per kilowatt hour on all self-consumed energy. The government also told solar producers that it would stop taking their power – and would offer no compensation – when their output overwhelms the system.
The result of these and other changes, says the solar industry, has been a surge in bankruptcies and a massive decrease in solar investment.
In Belgium – where both regional and federal bodies hand out renewable subsidies – a number of retroactive changes have capped the largesse renewable producers once received. In one region the price for “green certificates” – which producers received for renewable energy – was slashed by 79%. The government original committed to buy green certificates at a benchmarked price for 20 years, then cut it to 10 years.
Belgium’s regulators tried to impose a fee on all energy added to the grid from small- to medium-sized solar producers. While the country’s court of appeals struck down that fee, a defiant regional government plans to reintroduce it next year, forcing all solar producers to pay an annual fee that varies with the power they pump into the grid. Various municipalities, meanwhile, are introducing taxes on new and existing wind turbines.
As in Italy, Belgium’s renewable sector in the county has gone dark –“imploded” in the view of a solar industry publication. Many companies shrank or went bankrupt.
In France the government last year cut by 20% the “guaranteed” rate offered to all solar producers, and retroactively applied it to projects connected to the grid in the previous three months. The government is also considering ending an 11% tax break on solar energy producers.
Perhaps the most dramatic moves occurred in Spain, for years the poster child for those touting a transition to green energy. Since 2000, Spain has given renewable producers $41-billion more for their power than it has fetched on the open market. To recover those subsidies, the Spanish government recently killed its Feed In Tariff (FIT) program for renewables,….
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US uses cheap power to lure ONT business
Ontario power bills spur US to try to lure companies
Soaring energy prices making Ontario look dim for manufacturers
Last updated Tuesday, Mar. 18 2014, 9:16 PM EDT
For businesses in Brockville, the attempt to lure them over the border wasn’t new. But the pitch was.
Earlier this winter, manufacturers in the Eastern Ontario community received a letter reminding them that their province’s industrial electricity rates were projected to rise by 33 per cent over the next five years, and 55 per cent by 2032.
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“As a hedge against these increases,” it suggested, “setting up an operation just across the border in St. Lawrence County, New York, may be a competitive strategy you should consider.”
Such overtures, if not in written form then made more casually, are becoming increasingly common in Ontario. While they may not find immediate takers, they are emblematic of the mounting economic threat from an energy-cost trajectory that – following a series of questionable policy decisions – the province now seems powerless to do much about.
Owing mostly to a combination of overdue investments in infrastructure, phasing out coal and an ill-fated gamble on green energy, soaring power rates have already greatly increased the cost of doing business in Ontario. That’s particularly true for those in the troubled manufacturing sector. In a report last month, the Association of Major Power Consumers of Ontario (AMPCO) alleged that the province now has “the highest industrial rates in North America”; per that report, prices are currently 37 per cent higher than in neighbouring New York for the province’s biggest industrial users, and 68 per cent higher for smaller ones.
Adding insult to injury is that, because an excess of energy supply has come online at a time of decreased demand, Ontario is currently selling surplus power to New York and other neighbours at a steeply discounted rate….
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Parker Gallant: Hydro One and Ontario Energy Ministers–smarter? You judge
Hydro One and our Energy Ministers: Getting Smarter? You be the Judge!
Three bills in three weeks from Hydro One and a new line on the bill: “Miscellaneous Adjustment” got this writer wondering, why? The first bill came with an insert with the heading “Important Information about your enclosed Hydro One bill” and went on to explain that after they had “changed the meter at your premises, we experienced an issue which prevented the data from your meter from being processed in a timely manner in our system.” The meter they changed was a “smart meter” Hydro One installed a few years ago, so I assume this is a “smarter” meter. Calling the number on the insert allowed me to confirm with Hydro One that the meter change was due to a “communication problem.”
The upsetting part of the final bill is that when the all-in price of my power is calculated (including the costs of electricity, delivery, regulatory and debt retirement charge) it turned out to be 29 cents a kilowatt hour (kWh) and when I looked at my bill from November 2008 the all in charge was 16.5 cents a kWh. So in less than five years, the price had risen by 81%.
We’re doing our best to be responsible power consumers: we consumed less power than before and 71% of the billed electricity was in “off-peak” hours.
If one looks back this is what then Premier McGuinty said in his Throne speech of October 12, 2005 about smart meters: “Consumers can look forward to getting smart meters that will help them save money by telling them when they can pay less.”
An 81-% increase? Sounds like another broken government promise!
Those who have Hydro One as their local distribution company (LDC) will recall that only a few months ago, they sent another insert about a “new billing system” which allows them to bill on a “real time” basis. In effect this was a $160-million grab from ratepayers, perhaps to ensure their profits grow and that they can continue to pay dividends to the Province ($370 million in 2012). Profitability however, doesn’t cover off employee pension and benefit requirements as noted by DBRS, the Canadian bond rating agency, who listed Hydro One as # 8 on their recent list of worst funded pensions in Canada. Perhaps they should be funding their pension fund instead of making big dividend payments to the Ontario Ministry of Finance, but that might force Finance Minister Sousa to make some tough spending decisions.
My comments on “smart meters” are not new: back in July 2010 I pointed out that in a 3,400-page submission by Hydro One for a rate increase, the installed cost per smart meter was $700.54. That was confirmed by an exchange with a Hydro One officer. Now, the smart meters are having to be replaced? And not for the first time: Hydro One has needed to replace smart meters back in 2010 when the Newmarket Era carried an article about meter replacement in Keswick, Sutton and Mount Albert. My suspicion is that the form letter in our recent bill wasn’t the only one: who else in Prince Edward County and other parts of the province got it?
So, now, one wonders about the promises made for those smart meters. At $700.54 cents per meter the cost of replacing the old analog meter at our place is now $1,400.00; the Hydro One 2012 Annual Report indicates they are charging $1.52 per month as a recovery cost. At that rate, it will take them 76 years to recover their costs. Will Hydro One be spending hundreds of millions each year on “smart meters” instead of upgrading the important infrastructure such as transmission lines, transformers, etc.?
An interesting story recently came out of Germany: the German Federal Ministry of Economics published a study by Ernst & Young which basically concluded, no rollout for smart meters. Why? Ernst & Young did a cost/benefit study and concluded:
“The study comes to the conclusion that smart meters in particular for small consumers are not cost-efficient, as the potential savings would be well below actual costs of smart meters and their operation.”
In Ontario we seem to do things differently as was pointed out by the Auditor General in his 2011 report. Jim McCarter said that the initiatives behind the Green Energy and Green Economy Act were not based on a cost-benefit analysis. While not speaking directly to the issue of “smart meters” and their installation throughout the province this writer believes that the conclusions of a cost-benefit analysis would have reached the same endpoint as the Ernst and Young study completed for Germany.
When the McGuinty government gave its Throne Speech in 2005, the Ontario Energy Minister (Dwight Duncan) had already issued a directive to the Ontario Energy Board (OEB) dated July 14, 2004 to Howard Wetson, Chair, of the OEB (the Ontario Power Authority did not exist at that time) which instructed them to “implement a plan to achieve the government’s objectives for the deployment of smart electricity meters.”
No cost-benefit study was considered and Minister Duncan’s directive to the OEB simply had to be “formalized” before the media picked up on the government’s manipulation of the electricity sector without going through the legislature or a hearing before a legislative committee! With a single signature Duncan committed Ontario’s ratepayers to pick up a bill for at least $2 billion!
Several years after that 2005 Throne Speech and the Dwight Duncan directive, Tyler Hamilton (the “expert” commentator as noted by Alicia Johnston in e-mails recently released by the government and commented on by Tom Adams) wrote an article for the October 7, 2010 Toronto Star. The article was all about “smart meters” and the wonders they would perform for all of the ratepayers in Ontario. It contained quotes from an IBM “technology consultant” including this one: “ ‘Right now, Ontario is a world leader in the smart grid and smart meter systems,’ he explained. ‘Dozens of utilities around the world are watching what’s going on here. In a way, we have become a micro lab for the rest of the world.’ ”
Later on in the article Hamilton makes this comment: “With smart meters…we have a tool that helps us to at least manage our electricity bill and help offset electricity rate increases.”
Did Tyler Hamilton, the “expert” commentator, really understand what he was endorsing? I believe most ratepayers in the province have received absolutely no benefit from either “smart meters” or the “smart grid” –neither one has done nothing to improve the aging infrastructure in the Province or “help offset electricity rate increases.”
Germany, whom we copied on the FIT and MicroFIT programs apparently didn’t see it with the clarity of Tyler Hamilton or that IBM technology consultant.
Mr. McGuinty is now at Harvard and presumably living in Massachusetts where the average cost of power is about half of what I am being charged. I wonder if he and former Minister Duncan now appreciate the “green” mess they created.
Worse, power utilities around the world must now be laughing up their sleeve at the wasted money Ontario’s ratepayers are forced to absorb. The “microlab” referenced by the IBM technology consultant has turned out instead to be an incinerator for our hard earned dollars!
Parker Gallant,
September 7, 2013
Next time, we will look at the “smart grid”
The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent policies of Wind Concerns Ontario.
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