The daily struggle and worry that Glynnis Hill faces was raised in the Ontario legislature this week.

The London-area senior reads by candlelight and tries to stay up late to do her laundry when electricity rates are lower because she can’t afford the rising cost of her hydro bill.

Haven’t we been here before?

It was just these kinds of stories that helped elevate Premier Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservatives to power.

There was no single issue in the 2018 election that sunk the Liberals more thoroughly than the cost of electricity.

There was an avalanche of heartbreaking stories about people struggling to buy groceries and keep the lights on given the run-up in electricity prices. The billions the Liberal government borrowed to subsidize bills by 25 per cent did little to blunt that, and served to raise other concerns. And plenty of people were still angry about the cost of the two natural gas-fired power plants they cancelled years earlier.

Ford not only capitalized on that, he ramped up the anger and fears about affordability.

He promised to cancel green energy contracts and fire the pricey head of Hydro One, which he said would help him slash electricity bills by a further 12 per cent. Ford said he’d stop the waste and treat taxpayers with respect.

“I’m going to be up-front and honest about what I’m going to do,” he said in the PC party platform. “I won’t make reckless promises. When I make a promise – I keep it. Period.”

But he hasn’t. Not even close.

One of his government’s first acts was to scrap almost 800 renewable energy projects. The government refused to say what financial penalties would flow from that but repeatedly suggested it would be very little. Next to nothing, really.

As was inevitable, the other shoe has dropped.

Turns out the Ford government quietly tucked $231 million in a subsection of the Ministry of Energy’s operating expenses quaintly titled “other transactions” to cover those costs.

There’s nothing “up-front and honest” about that. Ford claims cancelling those contracts will save taxpayers down the line. But if giving businesses $231 million to do nothing isn’t waste, what is?

And this is just the money allocated for this year. The real bill has yet to be totalled, let alone paid.

The New Democrats, who unearthed the figures, were quick to point out that $230 million was also the original estimate for the gas plant cancellations, and that rose to about $1 billion.

And what of Ford’s promise to cut hydro rates by 12 per cent?

Rates have not gone down. In fact, this month they went up 1.8 per cent.

Ford said the average family would save over $170 a year (he was quite specific about that), but they’re paying $24 more.

“We’re still trying to figure out ways to lower those costs,” says Bill Walker, the associate energy minister.

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Right. After nearly a year and half of running the province they’re still trying to figure out how to deliver a key plank of their platform.

During the 2018 campaign Ford was unequivocal about what would happen; he said Ontarians could trust that it would happen because they could trust him.

But nothing has turned out the way Ford said it would.

His ham-fisted move to get rid of Hydro One’s top executive, whom he dubbed the six-million-dollar man, set in motion a chain of events that cost the half publicly owned corporation over $130 million.

And let’s not forget the $30 million of taxpayer money the government is using to fight Ottawa’s “job-killing carbon tax,” despite the fact that it’s not killing jobs and the dangers of climate change are all around us to see.

The Ford government’s energy bungles are mounting, costs are rising and there’s still no real plan for the future. This file has been one of the government’s major failures, though, admittedly that is a long list.

The premier is so far from seeing any of this that he announced himself to be “so proud” of how his government has handled things, including paying hundreds of millions in compensation for tearing up energy contracts.

The government is also trying to shift attention from its failure to reduce hydro bills, as it promised, by touting its move to make the bills themselves more transparent.

With Ontario taxpayers already spending billions to subsidize hydro bills, it never made much sense to spend even more to reduce them further, especially when the lion’s share of those benefits don’t even go to those whose need is greatest.

It was a reckless promise that Ford doesn’t have the money to deliver on.

But he can’t seem to admit that. Instead, he and his ministers keep pointing fingers at the past Liberal government and even the NDP, which hasn’t been in power since the 1990s, hoping people just won’t notice that they haven’t lived up to their promises.

With stories like Glynnis Hill’s being read in the legislature again, that strategy is not likely to succeed.

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