The Ontario Government has finally provided an accounting of the stranded debt, but they've titled the release obnoxiously wrong. The figures in the release show the residual stranded debt as rising from $5.6 billion in 2009 to $5.8 billion in 2011 -- meaning that even as the Liberals were campaigning on the premise that Debt Retirement Charges (DRC) were paying down the residual stranded debt, DRC charges were being made at a rate of roughly $1 billion a year, and the RSD wasn't going down.
Ontario Continues To Reduce Residual Stranded Debt:
Another notable features of this graph: the residual stranded debt jumps $4.4 billion when the Liberals are first elected. Remarkably the unfunded liability barely moved - only more of it was suddenly 'stranded.'"Today the government filed a regulation under the Electricity Act, 1998, to provide transparency and meet reporting requirements on the outstanding amount of residual stranded debt. The new regulation is in response to a recommendation by the Auditor General in his 2011 Annual Report.
Residual stranded debt is calculated by subtracting estimated future payments-in-lieu of taxes (PILs) and other prescribed amounts from the stranded debt. [emphasis added] The residual stranded debt was set out in 1999, when the former government restructured the electricity industry."
An additional $4.4 billion suddenly appears on the RSD, $2 billion in payments disappear, and the figure is now reported at $5.8 billion.
I wrote on this a couple of times last year - and consider myself fully vindicated in my claims:
http://coldair.luftonline.net/2011/08/retire-debt-retirement-charge.html
http://coldair.luftonline.net/2011/08/government-machine-rewrites-history-to.html
