A photo of Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
A photo of Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Credit: Premier of Ontario Photography Credit: Premier of Ontario Photography

Ford’s budget is brought to you today by the letters B and S. Ford is calling his budget “a serious budget for serious times”, still clinging to austerity to eliminate the deficit and bring in a balanced budget. It certainly is seriously flawed. Questions need to be asked about Ford’s budget spending of over $15 billion per year of your tax dollars. 

It is hard to believe Harris era hydro deregulation legislation and an Enron designed electricity market is still costing us a fortune. The Conservative promise on hydro deregulation was “lower rates and nothing will go wrong”.

Hydro deregulation is best described by one word, profitization.  

After the entire at-cost hydro system was changed into for profit corporations and the opening of the electricity market in June of 2002, rates soared and by 2018 rates hit all-time highs. It’s important to note that since June 2002, every single government including the Liberals, has artificially lowered hydro rates with subsidies. Ford has taken rate subsidies to new stratospheric levels, indefinitely. Obviously, something went very wrong. People are not complaining about hydro rates anymore because Ford has successfully hidden the problem. ere are the troubling facts:

A big part of high hydro rates is artificially created by our phony electricity market. Phony, because it is impossible to have a market for something you can’t store or stockpile. As we have seen in California, Montana, Alberta, India and elsewhere, Enron Electricity markets are notoriously easy to manipulate.

READ MORE: Ford is protecting high hydro rates

Ford is spending a massive amount pretending to lower hydro rates. For the second year in a row this year’s Financial Accountability Office (FAO) report shows that over the next five years Ford will spend over $33.7 billion an average of over $6.75 billion per year on hydro rate subsidies. 

The February, 2022 FAO report showed that Ford had been spending $6.9 billion a year subsidizing hydro rates and was projected to spend another $118 billion on subsidies in the future. This year’s FAO report shows that Ford is well on his way to that vast amount of spending. 

The 2022 report also stated that Ford would not be able to keep his election promise to lower rates by 12 percent. Rate subsidies lower bills but have not lowered hydro rates one bit.   

Hard to say, but Ford is partly right, The Liberals did make hydro rates much worse. Bringing in Bill 100, smart meters, Bill 91 and their sale of Hydro One. On February 14 of this year, Hydro One reported revenue of $7.78 Billion. This is money that used to go into government coffers to pay for things like healthcare and education. Now going to private profits.

This is the main reason why voters sent the Liberals to the political penalty box for two elections in a row.

On top of that, on January 26 the Toronto Star reported that Ford is also squandering billions on tax cuts, giving up $8.2 billion in revenue annually in tax cuts since 2018.

Let’s not forget that Ford just got $9 billion and multiple billions more for healthcare in his 10-year deal with Trudeau, and Ford is also still appealing his court decision loss on Bill 124, which denied nurses and healthcare workers a raise.

On hydro rates, we now have a situation where artificially high hydro rates are artificially being lowered by a multibillion-dollar subsidy year after year, indefinitely, never dealing with the cause of high hydro rates.

Ford is constantly repeating in the media on healthcare, “we can’t keep doing the same thing over and over”, which is exactly what Ford is doing with both tax cuts and subsidies.

Obviously, there is enough money to give nurses and healthcare workers a much needed and much deserved raise! So cut the BS and give them a raise!