Tim Hudak is the opposition leader of the Ontario PC Party
Ontario once enjoyed bountiful supplies of affordable energy — and used it over more than a century to build our province into an industrial powerhouse and resource development dynamo. But times have changed.
You may have seen a news article a week ago, for example, about how high electricity prices, along with a burdensome approvals process, add up to obstacles to investment in Northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire region. My caucus colleague, and Ontario PC energy critic, Vic Fedeli used a recent provincial parliamentary committee meeting to press the government for some answers about this critical issue.
Because it’s been in the news lately, I want to use the Ring of Fire to illustrate a broader point, to show how heavily energy costs can weigh on economic sectors like mining, forestry and manufacturing — where Ontario most urgently needs to kick-start job creation with more than half a million people unemployed.
The Ring of Fire should be a cause for optimism with the ongoing jobs crisis in Ontario. According to Richard Nemis, the entrepreneur who gave the Ring of Fire its name, the “economic impact of this discovery on the Ontario economy will probably run into the hundreds of billions of dollars over time.”