Two years after a Liberal government cancelled two gas plants, voters surely have a billion reasons to be aggrieved.

You may have heard that the auditor general has tallied the sunk costs, legal bills and relocation charges: $1.1 billion, more or less.

But before we gain closure on the shuttered power plants, one calculation remains to be made: What are the political costs of nuking two gas-fired facilities?

The fallout from a billion-dollar boondoggle defies easy measurement, but public opinion polls offer a few tantalizing clues. While the auditor was issuing her damning report this fall, pollsters were once again proclaiming the Liberals on top (or tied for first).

That suggests the gas plants remain on the backburner for many Ontarians — still simmering, but not top-of-mind. The opposition Tories keep demanding fresh elections to clear the air, but most polls show the results would merely replicate the tally from two years ago.

In a minority legislature, the next campaign may not be triggered for another year or two — by which time the radioactive half-life of those gas plants may have dissipated. That’s not to say the opposition onslaught hasn’t deeply wounded the Liberals:

It has produced two heads on a platter — Dalton McGuinty resigned as premier in disgrace, and (heir apparent) Chris Bentley quit as energy minister in disgust. The government was forced to release 160,000 documents — including a trail of emails that laid bare the entrails of Liberal cynicism. And the non-stop opposition tactics have consumed all the oxygen in the legislature, choking off the government’s embryonic agenda.

But if the Liberals are in foul odour over the gas plants, why aren’t they paying more of a political price?

Perhaps voters are unpersuaded by the political purity of the opposition. While the debacle disgusts people, it doesn’t rise to the level of a vote-determining issue — possibly because voters have never discerned any substantive differences among the rival parties.

After all, the Liberals only grudgingly agreed to nix the plants after local voters and the opposition parties pressured them into doing so. While it’s true that McGuinty didn’t give a second thought to costs, neither did anyone else. In Oakville, voters rewarded his recklessness. In Mississauga, they applauded his fecklessness.

In the aftermath, the opposition pounced over the cancellation costs. For all the subsequent outrage, those numbers weren’t unknowable: The Star first reported in late 2010 that the Oakville decision could cost $1 billion, yet the price tag never gained any traction on the campaign trail — because all three parties were too busy making the same opportunistic promises.

Now the Tories and New Democrats are clamouring for a formal judicial inquiry. As if we could usefully learn anything more by retracing the steps of the auditor and a legislative committee — neither of which has found a scintilla of criminality or corruption (just a lot of Liberal lowballing and deleted emails that leave little to the imagination).

McGuinty is the main bogeyman in this boondoggle. He unplugged the gas plants in 2011 to resuscitate his political career, only to be entombed by them a year later. But now that he languishes in political purgatory, how much more can you demonize a dead duck?

The opposition is trying to transplant McGuinty’s death mask onto Kathleen Wynne. Will voters blame the new premier for the sins of the father, now that she has publicly atoned on his behalf?

The bitter truth is that boondoggles are a dime a dozen in Ontario: On the very week that the auditor was unearthing details of the gas plant sinkhole, Toronto councillors were voting to dig unneeded subway tunnels across Scarborough — adding $1 billion to the bill, plus $85 million in sunk costs (gas plant style) for an aborted LRT. The Mike Harris Tories famously filled in the holes of a stillborn subway along Eglinton. The eHealth mess bears the fingerprints of both PC and Liberal mismanagement.

The opposition parties seem determined to win the next election by fighting the last one all over again. By always looking back, they risk being overtaken by more daunting issues on the horizon.

The province is now updating its long-term energy plan for a sector that sucks up roughly $15 billion annually on electricity expenditures. Renewable energy costs are soaring. Conservation remains untapped. Cheaper hydro imports beckon from Quebec. Almost unnoticed, the government has quietly nixed a $15 billion investment in new nuclear plants (after spending $180 million on the ill-fated planning phase). And a Tory plan to privatize our publicly owned electrical utilities, despite their last botched effort, has barely attracted attention.

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After two years of obsessing about the money pits of the past, Ontario cannot stay oblivious to the bigger, billion-dollar energy challenges of the future.

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