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“The government treats us like bourgeois sweatshop operators who have to be stopped,” said Bamford, who has organized dozens of medium-sized companies into the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers of Ontario. “All the businesses are terrified of the government. My husband said, ‘Well, do you just want to pick up and go?’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess I gotta just stay and fight.’ I feel like I’m the Norma Rae of manufacturing.”

Automatic Coating’s electricity bill has more than doubled in the past decade. Its bill for last November was $49,209.68. The first line is for electricity: $6,577.93. The second line is much harder to explain: it is the euphemistic Global Adjustment charge: 217,165 kWh at 11.6 cents each for a total of $25,223.73.

The Global Adjustment contains many different costs, including Ontario’s payments to solar and wind energy makers at far more than the market rate, the cost to sell excess power to U.S. states at a loss, and even the cost of replacing light bulbs with LED bulbs.

The government treats us like bourgeois sweatshop operators who have to be stopped

For manufacturers, the Global Adjustment fee symbolizes all the excesses of Ontario energy policy, including headline-grabbing salaries at state-owned utilities and the wages for the armies of bureaucrats who manage what plant owners describe as the province’s Byzantine array of energy cost-abatement programs.

“They have an open invitation to take whatever they want,” said Jerrod Rowntree, manager of a unionized, Korean-owned plant in Simcoe, Ont., that employs 110 people to make magnet wire for Tesla Inc., the Chevy Volt and transformers. “What’s their rhyme or reason to put their hand in our pocket whenever they want?”