Kelly McParland finds yet another sneaky change to Ontario law the government tried to slip in un-noticed:
Here’s a great story about the absurdity that ensues when a government tries to force-feed an impractical policy to the population for the sake of environmental posturing.
If you don’t want to read the original, here’s a capsule version:
Ontario sponsors a program to encourage small users of solar power by giving them subsidies. Except it has proved so popular, especially in rural areas, the province quietly slashed the subsidy late last Friday. (You remember Friday, right — quiet sleepy day between Canada Day and the weekend? If you really really wanted to release something at a time no one would notice, you couldn’t pick a better day. Not that the McGuinty government would deliberately try to hide what it was doing, of course. Oh no). The result is that people who bought into the program won’t get nearly the amount they expected. Now they’re upset — having discovered the ruse despite the government’s effort to hide it — and are bombarding MPPs with complaints.
Great eh? That’s good old Dalton McGuinty — absolutely, totally dedicated to energy conservation and environmental improvement, as long as it’s costing someone else money and not him.
This is yet another example of how the McGuinty government loves to sneak in unpopular changes and hope nobody notices for a while. Stealth nanny state tactics? Ladies and gentlemen, I present your Ontario government.
Update, 12 February 2011: The poor folks who took up the McGuinty government’s solar power subsidy are being shafted again:
Added to McGuinty’s problems with wind are similar signs of trouble on the solar front. After strongly encouraging individual solar projects, and offering outrageously generous pricing on solar-generated power, the province unexpectedly announced last summer it was slashing the rate it would pay on some projects. On Friday, hundreds more Ontarians were told that installations they’d erected at the behest of the government can’t be connected to the provincial grid because of technical problems. Rural residents, some of whom have invested large amounts in solar generating operations, will be left high and dry.
[. . .]
Angering rural voters, and battering your credibility with the environmental crowd, aren’t great ideas if you run a government that faces an election in eight months. So it’s no wonder that Ontario’s Liberals sought to hide the bad news by releasing it when (they hoped) no one was watching. But the excitement in Egypt won’t last forever, and eventually people will notice that Ontario’s government, once again, has been forced into a humiliating retreat at considerable trouble and cost to individual Ontarians.
