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The NDP say they’ll find a way to make it work.

Photo by Ernest Doroszuk / Ernest Doroszuk/Toronto Sun

“We are going to wind up the Fair Hydro Plan in a way that’s responsible and protects consumers to keep bills from going up, and in fact ensure they go down, by gradually taking private profit out of the hydro system,” NDP spokesperson Andrew Schwab said by email, when I asked how an NDP government would keep bills from rising if the government stops subsidizing them.

“The mechanics of wrapping up the Fair Hydro Plan, and replacing it with our priorities that deal with the underlying costs (as outlined in our plan) will have to be developed with ministry, OPG and our panel of energy, planning and financial experts,” he added.

If you’re getting a sense that all the major parties’ hydro plans are bad, you’re right.

The Liberals’ Fair Hydro Plan, the currently operative policy in Ontario, lowers bills now in exchange for paying all that money back with billions of extra dollars in interest later. It leaves Hydro One as a half-privatized mutant, unsure whether it’s a public utility or a private corporation.

The NDP’s plan buys back control of Hydro One, removes a lot of incentives to use electricity more efficiently, and hopes the feds agree to cut sales taxes on it because why wouldn’t they? They say this adds up to a 30-per-cent price cut, though from where bills were before the Liberals did their trick.

Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Canadian Press

The Progressive Conservatives’ plan is to fire the top people at Hydro One and transfer some expenses off hydro bills and onto tax bills. They’ve also repeatedly promised to “stabilize industrial hydro rates through a package of aggressive reforms” but haven’t said what those are. They say this works out to a 12-per-cent price cut on top of the Liberals’ 25-per-cent price cut, though they’d have to sort things out on the tax end somehow and also pay back the same loans as the Liberals.

Only the Greens say yup, we’d cancel the Fair Hydro Plan and bills would rise and that’s the way it should be. They are the only party talking about this issue as if we’re grown-ups.

All the others shuffle costs around — into the future, or from one budget to another — without making electricity any cheaper to generate or transmit. Nobody can do that unless they’re willing to attack the wages of tens of thousands of power-industry workers, which nobody is. So they’re just offering us different ways to fool ourselves.

dreevely@postmedia.com

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