Ontario Liberal party should be on hook for wasted money – by Christina Blizzard (Toronto Sun – April 17, 2013)

http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/home.html

TORONTO – What a wretched, wasteful, deceitful government this is. This week we got the full accounting for the disgraceful way the Liberals scrapped the Mississauga gas-fired generating plant in the heat of the 2011 election.

It was not the $190 million they consistently told us it would be. Auditor general Jim McCarter revealed Monday the bill for that piece of Liberal incompetence is $275 million.

This was a decision taken by the Liberal campaign team so, as Tory Frank Klees asked in the legislature Tuesday, why isn’t the Ontario Liberal Party on the hook for the bill?

“Given that it was a Liberal Party decision to incur $275 million of costs, will the premier agree that it’s the Liberal Party of Ontario that should pay that money?” Klees asked.

It’s about time also we put to an end this nonsense that it was something all parties agreed to do. It was a Liberal decision to build the two plants in Oakville and Mississauga. They picked the locations. It was a Liberal decision to cancel them. You can’t blame the two opposition parties for fixing the Liberals’ mistakes.

And the Liberals botched the cancellation – as McCarter so ably pointed out. They gave away $36 million in potential savings associated with gas delivery costs.

As part of a legal settlement, they paid a U.S. hedge fund 14% interest in a $263-million line of credit.

Every time they opened their mouths, they screwed up.

This is just the last in a long string of outrageous goofs, gaffes, scandals and boondoggles.

Take chemo-gate.

Had it been discovered when Mike Harris was premier that a private company mixing cancer drugs had been providing watered-down drugs to hospitals, he’d have been burned in effigy.

Demonstrators would have trampled every crocus, every daffodil on the lawn at Queen’s Park to protest this disgraceful mistake.

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