Meanwhile, the opposition Conservatives kept peddling the same old lie: that electricity from every new renewable project costs 80 cents a kilowatt hour and nuclear is cheap. The fact is that new nuclear and offshore wind were each projected to cost about 17 cents per kilowatt hour.
* * *
Another thing I often get blamed for is the cancellation of the gas-fired power plants in Mississauga and Oakville. I didn’t do it; indeed, I was out of government by then. But many of my critics and a few of my “friends” have suggested that I was complicit in their cancellation. Here are the facts.
When I arrived at the energy ministry, a contract had already been awarded to a private company, Greenfield South, to build a smallish (280 megawatts) gas-powered plant in southern Mississauga, near the Sherway Gardens shopping mall. But the plant had not been built; indeed, the proponents seemed to be dragging their feet and there were rumours that they were struggling to get their project financed. As time passed, opposition to the power plant grew. The local MPP, Peter Fonseca, was adamantly opposed to it. He was not prone to exaggeration, so I took his intensity very seriously. Accordingly, I asked the Ontario Power Authority (OPA), which had awarded the contract, if there was any way we could get out of it. I was told, in unequivocal terms, that the contract had NOT been breached by the proponents and, therefore, we could NOT pull the plug on the project without an enormous penalty. So I did not cancel the project.
Beyond that site, however, the OPA was still intent on addressing perceived electricity supply inadequacies in the southwestern GTA by contracting for another, larger gas plant. Whether to use the site of the closed Lakeview coal-fired plant was an intense local issue. I knew the site well: my father had hauled coal to the plant there, our family frequented adjacent Marie Curtis Park, and for years I had a nearby newspaper delivery route. Ontario Power Generation (OPG), the government utility that owned the site, and Enersource, the profit-oriented City of Mississauga electricity distribution company, both saw dollar signs and sought to put a gas plant there. Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion was also behind the idea. And, to be frank, there was a lot of logic in continuing the historic use of the site for a power plant.
There was another vocal school of thought, however, one with support on Mississauga City Council and among citizens I knew from having worked that turf in the 1987 provincial election campaign. Charles Sousa, our MPP for the area (later to be finance minister), reached out and, perhaps to his surprise, found me intensely sympathetic to the idea that this site had a higher purpose over the long term. Just weeks after I took over at energy, I announced that the Lakeview site — two hundred hectares in all, more than double the size of Exhibition Place — would NOT be used for a new power plant. Instead, it would be the site for a major waterfront redevelopment project, including residential, commercial, educational, and recreational facilities and a parkland trail. Because developable waterfront sites like this are so rare, I stand by the decision. I am confident that, given time, Mississauga will have a glorious waterfront opportunity realized with a tangible value of greater than $1 billion and an even greater intangible value.
However, I acknowledge that the decision to take Lakeview out of play helped tip the balance in favour of the eventual decision to locate a gas plant beside the Ford plant in Oakville, although there were multiple sites in Mississauga and Oakville that were part of the competitive process run by the Ontario Power Authority. I was not directly involved in the selection process. When the OPA selected the Ford/Oakville site in the fall of 2009, I was a little surprised because I had heard about a competing site in the Southdown Road area of Mississauga that had already undergone an envir-onmental assessment. But I wasn’t concerned with the Ford site selection at first blush, given that Oakville had already zoned the lands for industrial use and that the laws governing emissions from such plants are quite strict.
So, a decision was made, but I made sure the Premier’s Office signed off on it before going ahead.
I was mindful that just a few years earlier, while I was minister of health, our government had decided to install a 650 megawatt gas plant on the waterfront in my riding: the Portlands Energy Centre. (Ironically, in my first event as minister of energy, I attended its formal opening.) I was very dissatisfied with the lack of a heads-up on that decision for me and my community. I was especially displeased that my relationship with the Toronto Island and waterfront communities wasn’t considered. But instead of griping from the sidelines, I undertook my largest single effort to inform my constituents about a local public policy development. I spearheaded a public meeting at the historic Enoch Turner schoolhouse in Corktown, where I forced the senior executives from proponent partners OPG and TransCanada to make their case and take questions from the community. I remember that two New Democrats from the neighbouring riding, MPP Peter Tabuns and City Councillor Paula Fletcher, also attended. But rather than making a big fuss as anticipated, they absorbed the information and left. This might be another example of Barbara Hall–style public engagement.
Taking a cue from this previous experience, I brought Colin Andersen of the OPA with me to a public meeting at the Mississauga Performing Arts Centre, and in front of a hostile crowd numbering hundreds we made our case for the southwestern GTA power plant procurement to move forward. That night I earned one of several below-the-belt Hazel McCallion scars, but I knew what I was getting myself into.
The Oakville site was announced in September 2009. At that time, I was seriously considering a run for the Toronto mayoralty. Over the next few months, energy matters influenced my decision to quit provincial politics, but I don’t remember this being one of them. That is to say that the pressure to cancel the Oakville plant grew over time, and the shit didn’t hit the fan until after I had gone. The timing of my departure fed the narrative that I made a controversial policy decision and then didn’t stick around for its implementation, but I take that slur as a compliment. By which I mean that the government lacked the stomach for governing after I left. My mistake was that I imagined my successors would be as active and involved on files as I was. They weren’t. They lacked the backbone to defend the initial decision and bowed to public pressure. Shorter-term political calculations came much more into the fore — “ignore the headlines” gave way to “reverse the headlines.” That attitude fueled the notion that every policy position, stance, and value was up for grabs or somehow malleable.
The government became conflict-averse and sought appeasement instead. So the controversial gas plants were cancelled — first, Oakville in 2010 and then Mississauga in 2011, at the outset of the provincial election campaign. In their place, plants would be built in Sarnia and Napanee, two “willing hosts.” The saddest bit about this for me is that the principle of local generation, which should be central to a smart and safe electricity grid for the future, was thrown overboard. Instead, we are going to burn a fossil fuel to make an electron and then ship it hundreds of kilometres because the GTA couldn’t meet its own requirements. It’s a proper concession to import hydroelectric power from Quebec or even to get more renewable energy out of Ontario’s north, but transporting energy from a distant fossil-fueled generator is a step back to the 1950s.
The cost of the cancellations soon became an issue. The government, on the advice of the OPA, initially pegged it at $40 million. The price tag then began creeping upward, with a new figure seemingly every month. What that tells us is that the decision was made hastily in an over-heated political climate. I feel confident that, having been involved in all the contracts myself, I could have quickly indicated the high-end risk and discounted the ridiculously low first number, which was eventually inflated by the auditor general’s office’s preferred scandal plateau of $1 billion. I think that a more honest early assessment on the actual cost risk would have slowed enthusiasm for cancellation.
Liberals like to tell themselves that the cancellations, however costly, at least served the purpose of saving the seats of four governmen
t MPPs. But I believe they would have won their seats anyway, and reliance on this seat-saver rationale enhances public cynicism.
In defence of the gas-plants decision, McGuinty said: “It is never too late to do the right thing.” It is nice to land on the same side as Erin Brockovich, even if it was a tortuous path getting there. But I think the arguments on the other side are more compelling. The cancellations pushed Ontario backward, rewarded crass politics, and emboldened local selfishness about energy generation.
There is always an upside to bad news, however. The good news in the gas-plants saga is that in the coming years I am going to be able to go with my kids and enjoy the Mississauga waterfront because the political leaders of the day decided the Lakeview site didn’t have to be used for generating electricity. Pickering deserves the same fate. By closing the aging Pickering nuclear plant, we could begin using that site to create another gem on the GTA waterfront.
* * *
The other half of my portfolio was infrastructure. And here, after criticizing McGuinty on gas plants, I have to give him credit. He realized that the government needed to get its infrastructure act together, and he moved forcefully on this front. The government was responsible for 154 hospital corporations, 22 universities, 24 community colleges, almost 5,000 schools, 16,900 kilometres of highways, 2,800 bridges, more than 6,000 government buildings, and so on. And it was flying blind, without a clue where it stood with respect to the state of repair of all this infrastructure.
In his first term, McGuinty put David Caplan in charge of infrastructure renewal, and Caplan did three big things: 1) he implemented a “smart growth” plan for the GTA, favouring “intensification” of already built-up areas as opposed to urban sprawl; 2) he adopted a pan-government view of infrastructure as opposed to the “siloed” thinking of the past; and 3) he significantly reworked the Tory P3 model, replacing it with “alternative financing and procurement” (AFP). Critics — especially in the labour movement — say P3s and AFPs are one and the same. There is some truth to that. We essentially relabelled P3s, which we had fought in opposition. But unlike P3s, the AFP model does ensure ultimate public ownership of new facilities, and some unions have even invested their members’ pension funds in these projects.
As I noted in chapter 5, P3s (or AFPs) are not “free,” contrary to widespread public belief. They still require significant spending by government, which in turn increases the public debt. I am not insensitive to debt. But spending on capital, as opposed to operations, is an investment that will pay off for many years in the future. And we invested far more than previous governments in the province’s infrastructure. The Rae government, for example, built one new hospital (in Wawa); the McGuinty government built or rebuilt forty-two across the province.
Unfortunately, because the capital planning process is stretched out over years, projects are too often celebrated by politicians well in advance of their actual construction. As a politician myself, I am quite familiar with the attraction of announcements. But the trap set by early announcement is cost projection. Because politicians cannot resist the temptation to make announcements, they set themselves up for “gotcha” moments years later when the costs come in way beyond the projection. An excellent case in point is the Thunder Bay hospital, which, as I mentioned in chapter 4, had a cost overrun of more than 100 percent.
The problem is that individual ministries, such as Health, can handle only a small number of capital projects at the same time. The ministry does not have the capacity to oversee, say, the construction and significant renewal of forty-two hospitals. So the McGuinty government established Infrastructure Ontario (IO) as an agency to handle all the government’s big capital projects. IO was equipped with the skills and resources to handle multiple projects simultaneously and to attract outside funding (including foreign investment) for them. The cost of raising money was higher for the private sector. But for the government that cost was offset by the private sector taking on the risk of cost overruns, not to mention the ability to undertake many more projects simultaneously.
During the financial crisis, I was the front person in dealing with the federal government on infrastructure funding. (As a response to the recession, Ottawa set up a $4 billion “stimulus” fund for capital projects that could be brought on-stream quickly. The money was supposed to be matched by the provinces and municipalities to maximize the impact on the economy.)
My role brought me in contact with three former members of the Harris government — Jim Flaherty, John Baird, and Tony Clement — who had migrated to Ottawa under Stephen Harper’s banner. You might think that our partisan differences would make for a difficult relationship, but we actually got along very well for the most part and we understood each other’s needs fairly well. Some 2,600 different projects were approved by the two governments in a short time span. It was the ultimate in political horse-trading. They wanted, say, to initiate construction of a four-lane highway in Kenora to help their local MP, Greg Rickford, whereas I sought federal investment in the Sheppard LRT in Toronto. We both got what we wanted. These were win/win deals.
One area of potential conflict was over Toronto’s demand that its proposed $1.2 billion purchase of new street cars from Bombardier to replace its aging fleet be eligible for federal funding. (Yes, people, this is the same contract that has caused the city so much grief in recent years.) The proposal did not meet federal criteria for stimulus funding because Toronto had already decided to buy the streetcars and the delivery date fell beyond the stipulated time frame. But Mayor David Miller was adamant, desperate, really, that the project should be supported. At one point, Baird was caught in an unguarded moment telling Toronto to “fuck off.”
During this standoff, I got word that Miller wanted to speak to me, and he reached me at the University of Guelph. Despite my lack of sympathy for Miller’s position (it was not “stimulative”), I supported him, and Ontario showed flexibility on the project. I did this for only one reason: if I hadn’t, Miller would have called the premier, and McGuinty’s instinct would have been to placate the mayor. Not being stupid, I concluded that if we were going to end up there anyway we might as well look nice doing it. By then McGuinty was well established as a pro-Toronto premier, and I played this one to brand. In the end, Toronto still didn’t get federal funding for its streetcars. But as a result of a carefully calibrated compromise, it did get some $200 million for other projects. And by the end of 2018, most of the streetcars still had not been delivered.
Whatever goodwill I generated with Miller wasn’t too apparent in his response to the arbitrary selection of the West Don Lands as the Pan Am Games Village site. I take full responsibility for this one. Ironically, David Peterson’s government had designated the site beside the Don River for a housing development, to be called Ataratiri, and expropriated hundreds of brownfield sites for the project. That was in the late 1980s, when Liberals were aggressively pursuing housing policies. But the project was cancelled by the Rae government.
Two decades later, after massive spending on soil decontamination and flood control, a new neighbourhood had been extensively planned for the site. Peterson, by then chair of the Pan Am Games bid committee, came to me with a serious dilemma: PASO, the governing body for the games, had just adopted the Olympic accommodation standard for athletes, and that ruled out the planned use of York University student residences. “I want to build a village at Ontario Place,” said Peterson.
Without skipping a beat I said, “No.” Ontario Place had insufficient infrastructure and had not been planned for residential use, and installing the athletes’ village there would be very complicated, in both a political and a planning sense. “As an alternative,” I said, “we have a community that is already fully planned, and ironically it’s part of your legacy as premier.” Thus, the Pan Am Village at West Don Lands was born. When PASO representatives visited the site and saw what we planned, they were impressed. The athletes’ village was both a prime selling feature and a prime leg
acy of the games.
Years later, however, I continued to hear that Mayor Miller was pissed because the city wasn’t given the chance to decide on the site. But there was no time for that, and we sensibly leveraged work that was already approved by the city with local efforts from community veterans like Councillor Pam McConnell.
A few months after that decision, I was to leave my job and run for Miller’s. He quit. I lost.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Christopher
Christopher Peloso and I liked to joke that we first met when I picked him up at the Toronto bus terminal upon his arrival from Sudbury in 1994. While not the case, it wasn’t long after his arrival that we met. It was easy to strike up a conversation because, in the dead of winter (okay, a Toronto winter), he was walking about with his coat undone. I soon learned that was the norm for the claustrophobic Christopher.
He was nine years younger than me, but by then Christopher and I already had a lot in common. I hadn’t even tried the university route, and he had bailed after one semester at Laurentian. A man not without his own obligations, he was drawn to Toronto by the prospect of liberation. Leaving Sudbury was bittersweet for Christopher because, while his sexual orientation was proving a tough fit in his home community, he was a new father. For every day that he lived, Christopher was steadfast in fulfilling all the obligations that fatherhood entails. I witnessed Christopher’s sacrifices in Toronto to make sure his daughter had what she needed, both materially and emotionally.
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