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“Many of the manufacturers in this room have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars … on energy-efficient equipment so we can lower our greenhouse gas (emissions),” said Jocelyn Bamford, vice-president of sales and marketing at Automatic Coating. “We have done … our part to make sure we’re participants in the global cause.”

Certainly, she said, none of the manufacturers in the room wanted to leave Ontario for cheaper energy jurisdictions — which are legion. And yet: “We are courted on a weekly basis by U.S. areas that want us to move our plants down there. They welcome us with open arms,” she said. “We want to have the same feeling from the Ontario government. Because right now, we are not feeling the love.”

Leland president Byron Nelson said the 220 jobs at his Scarborough plant were not in jeopardy, but that expansion in Ontario certainly is. He has his eyes on Illinois, where energy prices are roughly one-third those of Ontario. His brother set up shop in Mexico, he said, employing 30 people who could have been Ontarians.

“It’s not an easy decision to make (to relocate),” said Dan Pawlick, general manager at Copper Core, which employs 65 people making heat exchangers. “But if we’re going to be exporting, we have to be on a level playing field with our competitors.”

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Wynne’s government, and Dalton McGuinty’s before her, tilted that playing field for reasons ranging from defensible to indefensible to near-criminal. It’s not at all clear how she will tilt it back without simply handing out cash she doesn’t have to industries who show up at her doorstep in search of “love.” Not that Canadian governments are above such tawdriness, of course, but it’s hardly a sustainable strategy and it forsakes the market-based approach to emissions the Liberals claim, however dubiously, to favour.