OP-ED: Doug Ford’s net-zero fantasy costs Ontarians billions in electricity subsidies

"This year, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government is subsidizing the cost of electricity in Ontario to the tune of $6.5 billion."

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Author: Dan McTeague

This year, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government is subsidizing the cost of electricity in Ontario to the tune of $6.5 billion.

In other words, $6.5 billion in electricity costs this year will not appear on electricity bills, but will instead appear on the provincial books – ultimately to be paid for with tax dollars.

It’s the largest such subsidy of any Canadian province, by a country mile.

That’s a shocking amount of money, especially because Ford came into power in 2018 promising to fix “The Liberals’ disastrous energy policy” which, in his words, consisted of “lucrative subsidies given to ‘renewables’ – especially inefficient wind energy.” Said Ford, “Thanks to heavily-subsidized and over-priced wind power that we do not need, electricity rates have skyrocketed.”

He wasn’t wrong – in the fifteen years the Liberals had been running Ontario, electricity rates had gotten out of control. Residential electricity prices in Ontario increased by about 71 per cent from 2008 to 2016 alone. And the Net-Zero obsessions of Premiers McGuinty and Wynne were the main reason for that.

Energy affordability became such an issue that McGuinty felt compelled to introduce the ridiculously named Ontario Clean Energy Benefit (OCEB) – ridiculous because it suggested that we were benefiting from “clean” energy, when really the province was in panic about how expensive “clean” energy was, and so subsidized it by 10 per cent for certain customers.

But directly subsidizing electricity bills really took off when Ford took office. His Ontario Electricity Rebate (OER), introduced in 2019, was meant to cushion the blow to consumers after he cancelled Kathleen Wynne’s Fair Hydro Plan, which had artificially kept down rates by deferring payments over several decades.

The OER has remained in place, and – because electricity costs have continued to go up under Ford – increased steadily over the past few years. In November, it jumped from 13.1 per cent to 23.5 per cent!

And in 2021 his government introduced the Renewable Cost Shift, which transfers about 85 per cent of the costs of roughly 33,000 provincial wind, solar, and biomass projects from ratepayers to the provincial tax base.

Under Ford, subsidizing the cost of electricity has become among the biggest single line items in the Ontario budget.

So why, nearly eight years into Ford’s premiership, is electricity so expensive?

Well, despite making a big show of cancelling hundreds of “green” energy projects at the start of his tenure, Ford’s Ontario remains locked into thousands of bloated wind-and-solar contracts. Ford and his allies have defended this by arguing that they are merely playing the hand they were dealt by the Liberals. But they’ve actually embraced the McGuinty/Wynne legacy

.

Wind-and-solar (especially wind) represent a larger percentage of Ontario’s energy mix today than when Ford became premier, and in 2024 he announced plans to double Ontario’s wind capacity in the next decade.

Meanwhile, Ford is also pushing for a full-blown “energy transition” in the hope of achieving net-zero by 2050, according to his “Energy for Generations” plan. That means phasing out natural gas (the cheapest and most reliable energy option for millions of Ontarians) almost completely by 2050, while electrifying everything from transportation (he’s heavily invested the province in EVs), to home heating and industry.

Which is to say, his plan is to further stress an already overburdened electrical grid, which will drive costs up even more, leading almost inevitably to higher subsidies. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Now, you might be asking: what is the problem with subsidized electricity? Don’t these subsidies make it more affordable?

Not at all! What they actually do is hide the expense of wind and solar and the EV agenda and other crazy ideas and thereby obscure the true cost of electricity in Ontario. Without facing that true cost, the policy approach will not change, but our taxes and our provincial debt – currently sitting at $458.6 billion – will keep going up.

You won’t see all this expense on your electricity bill, but Ontario will become less competitive and more expensive as its debt load grows uncontrollably.

The bottom line is this: Electricity costs (hidden and unhidden) are sky-high because Doug Ford is not fighting the battle he said he would. Instead, he’s feeding the Net-Zero beast. Until he scraps the subsidies, cancels the bad contracts, and starts us down the long, hard road of righting this ship, prioritizing our cost of living over ideology, that $6.5 billion hole will keep growing.

Ontarians deserve better: actual affordable energy, without all the smoke and mirrors.

Dan McTeague is a former MP and the President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.