Call it the 25 per cent solution — electrical and political.

That’s how much your hydro bill will be reduced by Premier Kathleen Wynne this year.

That also happens to be the percentage level her Liberal government has been reduced to in recent public opinion polls.

Rising rates and plummeting polls have jolted Wynne into an emergency response. And repentance.

Reaching for the political equivalent of a defibrillator, the premier is deploying a high-voltage electrical shock to revive her government on its deathbed. When it is formally released Thursday, her plan — first revealed by my Star colleagues — will be dissed and dismissed, dubbed a shell game within a political game.

The critics will be right. But when a province falls victim to hydro hysteria — wrongly accused of having the highest electricity rates in North America, and wrongly blamed for killing jobs — well, two wrongheaded criticisms can still make the critics sound right in the end.

Not so much a self-fulfilling prophesy as self-serving hypocrisy.

For we would be wise to abide by the old adage: Be careful what you wish for.

Ontarians have long bought into the dream that we could all buy low-cost electricity in perpetuity, as in neighbouring Quebec and Manitoba. Never mind that we lack their geography, with their bounty of cheap hydro power.

Lacking their abundant resources, we opted for resourcefulness: Financial engineering to pay for our nuclear engineering.

Now, the Liberals are dipping into the well again, buying off voters with their own money. Ontarians wanted cheaper hydro, and henceforth they shall have it.

But lower prices, as we learned long ago, come at a cost. Financial shortcuts have long-term consequences.

Consume now, pay later. It’s the Ontario way.

Whether or not you think the latest plan is necessary, it’s not necessarily nutty. Experts have told the government that most of our electricity infrastructure has a much longer useful life than the 20 years it has typically been banking on.

Like homeowners who grow weary of an overly-aggressive amortization that pays down their mortgage in 20 years instead of 25 — leaving them house-rich but cash-poor — ratepayers are looking for relief. The government’s remedy is to smooth out the cost curve, stretching out the amortization of our electricity assets — nuclear and gas-fired power plants or wind turbines — further into the future, so that ratepayers don’t have to bear as much of the burden upfront.

The Liberals are also shifting an electricity subsidy for low-income ratepayers onto the tax base, on the grounds that it’s a social program, not a hydro program. In total, the government expects to reduce bills for all ratepayers by roughly 17 per cent.

And as previously announced, they are rebating the 8-per-cent provincial portion of the much-hated HST on electricity, as demanded by the opposition over the years. Taken together, it hits the psychological hurdle of a 25-per-cent drop in hydro bills.

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Will voters buy it? Or grumble about being bought off with their own money?

Urban residents who barely noticed their hydro bills — internet and mobile bills are rising faster — will wonder about the windfall. Rural ratepayers who complain about higher delivery charges probably won’t be pacified.

Will hydro’s high price points remain a talking point, right up to the next election in 2018? Or will this perennial issue fade away, as it has in previous years, now that the Liberals have cauterized the electrical burn?

Rightly or wrongly, the Liberals realized they couldn’t do nothing. Unlike the Progressive Conservatives under opposition leader Patrick Brown, who have said nothing about how they would reduce hydro bills (beyond overstating the alleged costs).

The New Democrats pre-empted the government earlier this week with a quickie plan of their own to reduce hydro bills even more — by up to 30 per cent. Their proposal came only after years of conspicuously avoiding any concrete solutions beyond an HST holiday (they keep counting on Ottawa to forgive the rest of the tax).

A more valid criticism is that the Wynne government is merely deferring costs, not cutting them. Fair point, though the usual targets — renewable energy, cancelled gas-fired power plants, and nuclear rebuilds — are not quite the culprits that critics love to lambaste (And in fairness, the Liberals have dialled down some of the more costly green energy programs in recent years).

Like all three major parties in government, the Liberals are guilty of their fair share of blunders — notably what I’ve called the stealth privatization of power plants over the years, and the sell-off of Hydro One. But the real reason rates rose so rapidly is that the Liberals rebuilt a crumbling electricity infrastructure, and tried to pay down the hated debt retirement charge — both inherited from the Tories.

Eventually, the bills come due and repairs become overdue. By and large, the big cost increases of the past decade can’t simply be wished away — until election day.

If you’re a voter dreaming of paying less for hydro, your wish may soon come true. For better or for worse.

Martin Regg Cohn's political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca , Twitter: @reggcohn

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