The Toronto Star's headline indicating Energy Minister Chris Bentley owned up to the politicization of electricity policy promised an article the wouldn't portray Mr. Bentley favourably.
I ended up appreciative that he owned up to it, leaving his questioner looking like an unprincipled opportunists. Governments are legally elected and none of the parties should have campaigned on throwing away the peoples' commitment undertaken on the advice of professional system planners.
The Liberal re-election campaign — not the government — made the controversial $180 million decision to scrap a Mississauga gas-fired plant, admits Energy Minister Chris Bentley.The entire article can be read at thestar.com
Testifying Wednesday at the legislature’s estimates committee, Bentley emphasized that the announcement came in “a Liberal Party press release” — not from the ministry.
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“It was our intention that should we form the government to relocate the plant,” the minister said, stressing he was not running the Energy department at the time.
“I became the minister in October of 2011 and proceeded to implement the commitment that we made, which was exactly the same commitment that your party made, which was exactly the same commitment as the NDP made,” he told Progressive Conservative MPP Rob Leone (Cambridge).
Bentley noted because both the Tories and New Democrats also pledged to close the plant there would have been a cost to abandoning the Sherway Gardens-area plant.
It ends with Nanticoke rumours, building on a comment in my previous post, the Star now acknowledges the cost of a new pipeline to Nanticoke is working it's way into negotiating the costs of abandoning the Oakville plant.
Sources have told the Star it appears TransCanada could wind up with the contract to retrofit the massive Nanticoke coal-fired plant to natural gas and a new pipeline to fuel it as compensation for the Oakville matter.
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