Article content continued

The Ontario Power Authority’s CEO testified to the committee that it estimated the cost of cancelling and relocating the Oakville gas plant at $310 million. News reports on the gas scandal often state that the gas plant cancellations cost $1 billion. That’s not true. Rather than the cancellations, the Ontario auditor general found that it was the decision to re-contract and relocate the unbuilt plants that was so expensive. The eventual hit for taxpayers and ratepayers was $275 million for the Mississauga plant and $675 million to $815 million for the Oakville move, according to the auditor general. Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli dismissed the cost to taxpayers as worth “less than a cup of Tim Hortons coffee a year.”

McGuinty has not been charged and was not targeted by the police investigation into the allegations of deleted emails. Some evidence does not flatter the former premier. When he was asked why no records to or from him appeared, he testified under oath that he didn’t use computers or a government email. When McGuinty’s email address turned up in some records, he corrected the record, saying he actually did have a BlackBerry when the gas-plant decision was being made and did use email, although he said that “overwhelmingly, the nature of my business, when it came to the gas plant or anything else, was verbal in nature” and didn’t recall using emails to discuss the gas plants.

Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner issued a report looking into the allegations of destroyed files called “Deleting Accountability.” She noted that Livingston said he was “motivated by a concern that email accounts for departing staff must be decommissioned to avoid the possibility that old accounts would continue to accumulate emails after staff had departed.” What the commissioner concluded, however, was that “Having regard to all of the information gathered, while I cannot state with certainty that there was an inappropriate deletion of emails by the former Premier’s staff as part of the transition to the new Premier, it is difficult to escape that conclusion.”