Premier Kathleen Wynne has finally apologized for the fiasco over cancelled power plants in Mississauga and Oakville that have cost taxpayers at least $585 million and dogged her minority Liberal government.

“The people of Ontario need to hear that I’m sorry,” Wynne said Tuesday night on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin.

“What’s needed right now is for the premier to say, ‘I’m sorry.”

The mea culpa came after months of opposition pressure on Wynne, who inherited the controversial issue from her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty , who did not apologize when he appeared last week before a legislative committee investigating the closures.

Previously, Wynne has acknowledged the cancellations before the 2011 election that reduced the Liberals to a minority was a “political decision.”

Earlier Tuesday, Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak accused the Liberals of trying to shift blame for the scandal by calling him to testify at the committee, where he renewed calls for a judicial inquiry into the cancellations.

He came under intense questioning by Liberal MPP Steven Del Duca (Vaughan) on why the Conservatives also promised to scrap the Mississauga power plant and whether Hudak knew how much that would cost taxpayers.

He repeatedly turned the questions back at Del Duca, saying it was the Liberals under McGuinty that pledged to scrap the plant near Sherway Gardens less than two weeks before the Oct. 6, 2011 election with no idea of cost.

“The insinuation that anyone other than the Liberal party is responsible for this fiasco is an insult to the intelligence of every Ontarian, a betrayal of the people who are now on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars to save a handful of Liberal seats in the last election,” Hudak testified.

Del Duca accused Hudak of “flying by the seat of your pants” by promising to cancel the Mississauga plant without his own cost estimate, and called the Tory leader’s answers “evasive.”

In the legislature, Government House leader John Milloy said Hudak’s criticisms ring hollow because he, like the Liberals, promised to cancel the Mississauga plant without knowing how much it would cost.

“There’s a double standard going on here,” Milloy said.

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New Democrat MPP Peter Tabuns said it was a poor idea for the Liberals to call Hudak because he had nothing to do with the plant closures and was “an attempt by the Liberals to confuse what is before us.”

Correction - May 15, 2013: This article was edited from a previous version that incorrectly said Kathleen Wynne had previously acknowledged that the cancellations were "politically motivated". In fact, Wynne had admitted that it was a "political decision" to close the gas plants.

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