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But perhaps the best return on investment has come for GreenField Specialty Alcohols Inc., a privately held Toronto-based company that also happens to be the Ontario Liberals’ biggest corporate donor. According to research by the CBC, ethanol-maker GreenField and its affiliate companies have donated over $433,000 to the Ontario Liberal party since 2007, including a whopping $134,700 payment in 2014, the year after Kathleen Wynne took over as premier. Over the same period of time — that is, starting in 2007 with the announcement that Ontario would require five per cent ethanol in all its gasoline — GreenField received over $160 million in corporate subsidies, $148 million of which came from the Ethanol Growth Fund, a program designed to boost ethanol production in Ontario.

The Liberals would like Ontarians to believe that they are capable of receiving partisan donations with one hand, and impartially signing off on corporate subsides and contracts with the other

Both GreenField and the Ontario government insist that nothing nefarious was going on: GreenField says it donates to several political parties (though, notably, none other to the tune of $433,000), and the Wynne government says it takes a “non-partisan” approach to handing out ethanol subsidies (the same non-partisan approach, we are to trust, it takes in all its dealings with companies and organizations that keep its party coffers flush with cash). Ontarians are to believe, therefore, that it’s just a coincidence that the Liberal party’s biggest donors also happen to be the government’s greatest beneficiaries: that the Liberals are somehow impervious to influence from wealthy stakeholders and capable of receiving partisan donations with one hand, and impartially signing off on corporate subsides and contracts with the other.