Sweetheart hirings, obscene pensions, bloated bonuses, skyrocketing salaries: You don’t need to be a rocket scientist — or an auditor — to know the numbers don’t add up at OPG.

Surely a nuclear engineer could do the math? Like Tom Mitchell, the handsomely paid CEO of Ontario Power Generation?

Mitchell’s a smart guy who doesn’t count with his fingers, but it’s hard to wag your finger at overpaid staff when you’re pocketing $1.7 million in a good year.

But where was OPG’s board of directors, who are supposed to oversee work flow, supervise cash flow and superimpose core values? You don’t have to be a right-thinking, God-fearing apostle to know something smelled rotten in the boardroom.

Surely an old Tory, proud of his Mennonite heritage, could see through the lack of thrift? Like Jake Epp, the chairman of the board at OPG?

Proudly pious, Epp was a canny cabinet minister in the Brian Mulroney era, but perhaps his $150,000 annual payment for the part-time OPG gig distracted him from the greed that took root around him?

OPG runs our nuclear reactors, so we hold its top brass to a higher standard of precision and prudence. Nuclear waste is dangerous, but corporate excess also rings alarm bells.

Why did all those smart OPG bosses overpay themselves while overcharging electricity ratepayers and impoverishing OPG’s sole shareholder — the government and people of Ontario? It looks like a failure of corporate governance, but no less a lapse by provincial governments.

OPG’s excesses are not unique in Ontario’s recent history or distant past: Remember ORNGE, eHealth, OLG? Remember the old Ontario Hydro, progenitor of OPG, which wracked up billions in debt?

At OPG, Epp and his fellow board members took their seats at the table in the mirrored headquarters building on University Ave. and went along for the ride. While the corporation took the rest of us for a ride.

The pension plan isn’t just gold plated, it’s plutonium-enriched: OPG contributes $4 to $5 for every $1 in pension contributions by employees — a bizarre imbalance compared to the 1:1 contribution ratio typical in the public and private sectors. The utility’s top five executives will get annual pensions ranging from $180,000 to $760,000 a year.

Auditor general Bonnie Lysyk reported a swelling of management ranks while unionized staff were slashed. And she raised red flags about loose hiring patterns that suggest nepotism.

It took Epp nearly a decade in the chairman’s chair to take note and take action. Heads rolled only this week, on the very day that the auditor’s report landed: Three top executives were cashiered (and will cash in, no doubt, once any severance pay and deferred pensions are rolled in).

The public may be stunned by the news, but this is old hat for OPG. The Ontario Energy Board ruled in early 2011 that its labour and compensation costs were out of line, disallowing $145 million in a rate review. An unrepentant OPG appealed that ruling through the courts.

The Tories still look to privatization as a panacea, as if private efficiencies would tame public featherbedding. Just don’t look to former premier Mike Harris for inspiration on matters of thrift: As lead director and later chair of Magna International, he pocketed as much as $685,000 in annual pay as his board authorized compensation in the tens of millions of dollars for top executives.

The truth is that there is no cure-all. Decades ago, the old Ontario Hydro was a favoured whipping boy under the Bill Davis Tories. Mismanaged by governments of all three stripes, the bloating and bungling continued. Under Harris, the Tories attempted a botched privatization that merely dismembered Ontario Hydro into an alphabet-soup of stillborn, still-public utilities: OPG, Hydro One, the IESO (and later the OPA) were spun off to provide electricity generation, transmission, co-ordination and planning, respectively.

Now, erstwhile waste has been exacerbated by excess: four boards of directors instead of one; and rival corporate cultures working at cross-purposes.

OPG’s recurring waste is a disgrace. But as we’ve learned from past sell-offs and chop-ups, the remedy is sometimes worse than the disease.

Where there is political will and fiduciary responsibility, there is a way. It’s not rocket science, nor is it nuclear physics.

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The buck stops with OPG’s shareholder — the government. And the bucks come from OPG’s ratepayers — us.

Public or private, it’s the corporate culture that counts. OPG needs an infusion of thrift and an inculcation of public service, not a sell-off to the highest bidder.