This blog was originally published in Professor Mark Winfield’s blog.

Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives have enjoyed a long-standing lead in the polls in the run up to the October 6th Ontario provincial election, but the race has tightened considerably over the past two months. With the PCs, Liberals, NDP and Greens moving into full election mode, the outcome now looks like anyone’s guess. What we do know is that the issues of electricity and energy are likely to be central to the campaign.

The electricity sector in Ontario has been in turmoil for the better part of the last two decades, following the Harris government’s experiments with a competitive market model for the system. Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government was seen to make a decisive move in the direction of ‘greening’ the system through its 2009 Green Energy and Green Economy Act, establishing a feed-in-tariff system for renewable energy projects.

This blog was originally published in Professor Mark Winfield’s blog.

Going into this fall’s provincial election the leaders of the Liberal, Progressive Conservative and New Democratic Parties rejected a call from Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner to introduce a price on carbon, either through a carbon tax or a cap and trade system. All three parties argued that other jurisdictions in Canada and the US are backing away carbon pricing, and that therefore Ontario should to the same to make sure that our industries are not put at a competitive disadvantage. Only the Green Party, currently running at less than 5 per cent in opinion polls, has endorsed the idea of introducing a carbon tax in Ontario. But Pricing carbon is essential to fulfilling Ontario’s existing commitments to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It will help prevent what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has termed “dangerous climate change.” And it is in our economic interest as well.

This blog was originally published in Professor Mark Winfield’s blog.

Last week’s announcement by the federal government of its sale of the reactor division of Atomic Energy of Canada (AECL) to SNC Lavalin for a mere $15 million comes as no surprise to those who have been following the nuclear industry in Canada over the past few years. The Harper government has been clear about its desire to offload the AECL financial “sinkhole” (in the words of the Prime Minister’s former Press Secretary) for some time. With more than a decade since AECL’s last sale of a new reactor, the failure of the $800 million MAPLE isotope reactor project, the controversy over the shutdown and safety of the NRU reactor at Chalk River, delays and cost overruns on power reactor refurbishment projects in Ontario and New Brunswick, and a perpetual need for annual bail-outs running into the hundreds of millions, the federal government has decided to cut its losses.

This blog was originally published on Professor Mark Winfield’s blog.

June 17, 2011

Ontario Power Authority
IPSP Consultation
120 Adelaide St. W., Ste 1600
Toronto, Ontario M5H 1T1

Re: Submission on Planning and Consultation Document.

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to you to provide my comments on the IPSP Planning and Consultation Document

I general I note that the OPA is largely proposing to follow the same approach to the development of the 2011 IPSP as it followed with the original 2007 Plan. Such approach seems likely to reproduce many of the problems that emerged with the original IPSP, particularly with respect to the consideration of environmental sustainability in the development of the plan, as documented in the attached paper authored by myself and colleagues at York University and the University of Waterloo, and published in the international journal Energy Policy August 2010.

This blog was originally published on Professor Mark Winfield’s blog.

Mark Winfield’s take

Q: Who are the Greens targeting in their platform and why?

They are playing to their core constituencies, although there are things here as well that are broader.

The Greens’ base is relatively young, in terms of their demographic relative to the other parties. They share the same basic, post-materialist positioning as the Liberals, the Bloc and the NDP supporters
Conservatives supporters are what political scientists tend to refer to as materialists – a very bread and butter, crime, law and order — exactly the sort of stuff the Conservatives are pitching on.

Green voters are more post-materialist and the environment is part of that – so is a higher concern for social issues. You see some of that reflected here as well. It is a relatively broad platform that is more than just environment, although environmental issues are very central to it.