Energy Minister Chris Bentley, who was in the hot seat for over a year in the scandal over cancelled power plants, says he will leave provincial politics next week.

The London West MPP plans to resign his seat Thursday, three days after Kathleen Wynne becomes premier and swears in a new cabinet on Monday.

Bentley released a two-page statement that did not mention the simmering gas plant issue, which had him facing contempt charges from the Progressive Conservatives in the legislature before Premier Dalton McGuinty prorogued it last Oct. 15.

“Our government got the main initiatives right over the past nine years in the face of some very challenging times, but not everything,” the lawyer and former attorney general and labour minister wrote.

“I have always done what I believed to be right for the people I serve.”

His announcement came a day after Wynne asked Auditor General Jim McCarter to expand his audit into the costs of cancelling the Mississauga gas plant — which the Liberals promised to cancel with less than two weeks to go in the 2011 election campaign — into the 2010 decision to scrap a similar plant in Oakville, also in a Liberal riding.

McCarter will report in late March or early April.

The government maintains cancelling the two plants and relocating them to the Sarnia and Kingston areas will cost $230 million, although some critics and opposition parties have put the tab at closer to $1 billion or more.

The New Democrats and Progressive Conservatives are calling on Wynne’s minority Liberals to resume a legislative committee that was looking into the cancellations, which the rival parties said were politically motivated to save Liberal seats in the election.

Bentley, once a law professor at the University of Western Ontario, had previously indicated he would not run in the next provincial election, but had not hinted he would leave early.

In breaking that news late last October, Bentley maintained it was not the gas plant controversy that prompted his decision and told the Star he had been “on this path for some time, though nothing that’s happened recently has got me off that path.”

“It is time to start writing the next chapter in my life, one with more room for my wife Wendy and my daughters Julia and Jocelyn.”

Bentley was not in charge of the energy ministry when the two power plants were scrapped — the minister in charge then was Brad Duguid, currently running the Economic Development and Trade department.

Bentley is one of several prominent Liberals to announce they are bowing out of provincial politics in the last 24 hours.

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Finance Minister Dwight Duncan said he will resign his Windsor—Tecumseh seat next week, and Northern Development and Mines Minister Rick Bartolucci said he will not run in the next election but will represent his Sudbury riding until then.

The departures of Bentley and Duncan means Wynne will have until mid-August to call byelections in their ridings.

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