A steel frame, shown Feb. 21, 2013, is all that's left of a gas plant that was supposed to be built in Mississauga. (Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail)

In the 2000s, the Liberals contracted private companies to build gas-fired power plants to meet electricity demand in the growing suburbs west of Toronto. One plant, to be built in Oakville, was contracted to energy giant TransCanada. The other, in Mississauga, was to be constructed by a little-known company called Eastern Power run by brothers Gregory and Hubert Vogt, through subsidiary Greenfield South.

But both plants ran into opposition from locals who didn’t want them built in their neighbourhoods. The well-heeled denizens of Oakville even managed to bring in Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist made famous by a Julia Roberts movie, for one protest. Whether there was actually any health or safety risk from the plants is debatable, but the politics prevailed.

Mississauga and Oakville are both in the 905 belt around Toronto, named after the local area code, which is typically the main battleground in provincial elections. The Liberals were trailing in the polls ahead of the 2011 vote and badly needed to hold on to their core of suburban seats to win.

In October 2010, Mr. McGuinty cancelled the Oakville plant. A year later, in the middle of the election campaign, he promised to cancel the Mississauga plant, too. The Liberals won re-election, including all the seats in the vicinity of the plants.

In order to compensate TransCanada and Eastern for cancelling the plants, the government gave each of them a new contract to build a plant somewhere else. TransCanada is now building a plant near Napanee; Eastern is building one in Lambton County, near Sarnia. The electricity will have to be piped from those locations to the Toronto suburbs, where the power is needed.