A company hired by the province to build an ill-fated power plant in Oakville was puzzled why the Liberal government wouldn’t override local objections as it had with York Region plant as the 2011 election loomed.

A lobbyist for TransCanada Corp. said Thursday the company was aware the plant on Holland Marsh flood plain in King Township was in a Progressive Conservative riding while the Oakville plant was in a Liberal riding.

“Our company would have found it strange that they enacted a regulation in King township and did not do so in Oakville,” Chris Breen testified before a legislative committee investigating cancelled power plants in Oakville and Mississauga.

Opposition parties said Breen’s remarks shed more light on how brazen the Liberals were in their efforts to protect Liberal seats as the government hurtled toward the 2011 election, which reduced former premier Dalton McGuinty’s administration to a minority.

“If they don’t think they’re going to take any political damage in a riding, they’ll do whatever they want,” said New Democrat MPP Peter Tabuns (Toronto-Danforth), his party’s energy critic.

“If they think they have to protect a seat, they’ll do whatever they can.”

Premier Kathleen Wynne has acknowledged the cancellations in Oakville and Mississauga were “politically motivated.”

“The Liberal government continues to use the ministry of energy as their political play-toy,” Progressive Conservative MPP Vic Fedeli (Nipissing) said after Breen’s testimony.

Breen also told MPPs that his boss was “exasperated” after the government axed the Oakville plant a year before the 2011 election.

The reaction followed two meetings with government officials on Oct. 5, 2010 — two days before then-energy minister Brad Duguid announced publicly that the plant was cancelled because of community opposition and lower demand for electricity.

At the first meeting with former premier Dalton McGuinty’s principal secretary Jamison Steeve, Breen and TransCanada chief executive officer Russ Girling were clearly told the contract would be cancelled.

“It was a very frank discussion . . . bad news, obviously, but at least it was frank,” Breen testified.

Later that day, TransCanada met with Duguid and two of his senior officials but did not get the same level of candour, Breen recalled.

Referring to government documents released last year that said someone from TransCanada “blew a gasket” at that meeting, Breen said: “As for ‘blew a gasket,’ there was some physical body language” as company officials were taken aback at the lack of clarity with Duguid refusing to confirm the cancellation.

“When we got outside, our CEO did say, ‘that was strange,’”Breen said.

“He was a little exasperated by that.”

Duguid, who is now Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities for Wynne, testified Tuesday that he didn’t feel comfortable breaking the news at that point.

“It was information I didn’t feel I should be sharing with anybody at that point,” Duguid told MPPs, calling such admissions a “slippery slope.”

The committee is trying to find out the actual costs to taxpayers and electricity ratepayers of cancelling and moving the Oakville plant, which TransCanada is now slated to build in Napanee.

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The minority Liberals have put the cost at $40 million but asked the Ontario auditor general’s office to investigate, with a report due by September.

Industry observers and opposition party critics have put the true cost between $600 million and almost $1 billion.

An auditor general’s report earlier this month put the cost of scrapping the Mississauga plant, axed less than two weeks before the 2011 election that reduced McGuinty’s administration to a minority, put the tab at $275 million — 45 per cent higher than the $190 million the Liberals had claimed for months.

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