I actually appreciate the question.

The decision to charge customers is based on the idea that the lines will be in the ground for 40 years, but they won’t be. We’re talking about a system that will not be functioning in 40 years. It cannot; not only because, technologically, gas furnaces are expensive compared to heat pumps—so, again, like rotary dial phones or Blockbuster Video, they are on their way out. That ain’t going to be here. The assumption that the vast bulk of customers will be repaid over 40 years is no longer true.

And in fact, Enbridge’s own consultants, in their presentation to the OEB, said that Enbridge was in the situation where they were headed towards going down, because people were going to abandon the system. There won’t be customers to pay in the future. Forty years ago, it was true; they were going to pay. It isn’t going to be true in the future.

Yes, we are seeing history repeat itself. The Liberals had a different technique. They would define where the OEB could make a ruling and then they would make their decision in another space, and it was always quite something amazing to watch, that major decisions were shifted out of the OEB, into ministerial area of discretion. But what’s happened here is they’re not even doing that, they’re just saying, “The minister can overrule. The minister can make these decisions. That’s the simple reality.” It’s even less of a regulator than it was in the past.

And you’re quite correct: If energy companies get the chance to write their own cheques on your bank account, man, they’re going to write a lot of cheques. That’s where we’re headed. That’s what this is all about.

But I’ll say the other thing: I don’t think that, in the future, this is going to be very different between rural and urban Ontario because both jurisdictions will be moving away from gas. There is no good financial reason to go to gas at this point. There is no good financial reason.

In fact, when you look at the studies done by the federal government, it is more expensive to go to gas than it is to go to a heat pump. That’s the simple reality. It was cheaper in Montreal to operate home heating and cooling on a heat pump than it was with gas. Montreal is not a hot place.

First of all, I have to say to my colleague, that was a really good speech, and maybe you should set aside your notes more often because it’s a very effective technique appreciated by all in the House.

Your comments about farmers and the sale of land: Could you expand a bit and give us a sense of where the rest of the farming community in Ontario is on this at the moment? Because it sounds to me like it would be a red flag.

I appreciate this opportunity to address the motion.

I had the opportunity, 10 years ago, to sit on the committee that carried out the inquiry into the gas plant scandal. All of us should be grateful to the Auditor General and the Integrity Commissioner for the work they did, shedding light on what has happened with the greenbelt scandal. But I know from experience, sitting on that committee of inquiry, that more can be done in finding out what happens when a government goes wrong.

For those who may not remember, in the 2000s the Liberal government commissioned two power plants to be built in Oakville and Mississauga, respectively, to deal with local electricity demand. In the run-up to the 2011 elections, the government faced growing problems with voters in the ridings hosting the plants and those who were neighbouring those plants—so much opposition that, in an attempt to secure government, the McGuinty government cancelled both plants, one before and one during the 2011 election. Of course, those cancellations triggered legal actions by the builders, and ultimately the Auditor General found that they resulted in losses to the ratepayers of approximately a billion dollars.

By the way, the Auditor General was much lauded by the Conservative Party at the time, and rightly so. The same Auditor General dug into the shenanigans around the removal of parcels of land from the greenbelt, for which she received much less goodwill from the same party, and she found that benefits to friends of the Premier came in at over $8 billion. No one has ever said that the Premier was not ambitious and generous with his friends, and he proved it with this.

Again, as a refresher, Premier McGuinty did not win the majority in 2011, and in the minority Legislature that followed that election, an inquiry into the gas plant scandal was forced into existence. After an attempt at stalling by the Premier, who prorogued the Legislature for a number of months, the committee was allowed to resume its work, calling civil servants, ministers and participants in the whole process before the committee to answer questions. There were 400,000 pages of documents provided to the committee of inquiry. We did a lot of reading.

There were a few things that became clear from the introduction of the emails and from the testimony of the many who appeared before the committee. The first thing that became clear was that the absence of emails, of records of activity were substantial—and the vital role of access to records in establishing what happened, even with the destruction of records. You should know, by law, government records were to be preserved and archived, and many weren’t. In fact, almost nothing came out of the office of the Minister of Energy and his staff. That led to a secondary examination by the privacy commissioner, who found large-scale destruction of records. Ultimately, the large-scale destruction of records led, as my leader has said, to criminal prosecution of senior members of the Premier McGuinty staff, with the conviction and jailing of chief of staff David Livingston. And, man, did that ever give us the sense of the moral compass of that government; did that ever clarify to the people of Ontario who they were dealing with.

In his report, the Integrity Commissioner noted that the calendar for the minister’s chief of staff, Ryan Amato, had times blocked off for meetings in the relevant period that were critical to the transfer of those lands but no participants noted, or purposes of meetings noted. The man must be incredible in terms of memory. I don’t know about other people in this room, but I can’t remember every item on every calendar day. I’m impressed.

There was a notable absence of emails and use of personal phones and personal email, apparently to get around the laws on preservation of archival material. An inquiry would give us a much better sense if there was an evasion of the Archives and Recordkeeping Act and the potential scale of that evasion.

I have to say to all of you that access to the actual records was critical to reconstructing what happened in the gas plants scandal. Something we discovered when we were questioning Liberal political staff and politicians in the committee was the staggering rate of early-onset memory loss. These were people in the prime of their lives, and they had the memory of people in their nineties. It was astounding to watch. I felt sorry for them, being struck down so young with that kind of malady. The records that didn’t get deleted did actually give us a chance to understand what happened.

Speaker, I think it’s going to be critical for a committee of inquiry to get records, because I have a sense that under pressure of testifying under oath, there may be some Conservative staffers and politicians who also suffer early-onset memory loss, and so in order to establish what’s going on, or what went on, access to records, even if they’ve been disturbed, will be critical. We need to ask: What did they forget, and when did they forget it?

The second thing that became clear from the records that did survive was what led to the decision to cancel the plants—I’m talking now about the gas plants scandal. The government and its ministers, who had seats directly affected by the plants, were distraught—you had to read the emails to understand it, to appreciate it—at the level of anger they were dealing with in their ridings. They were besieged. What we saw in their internal emails was raw political fear—raw political fear that translated into decisions for cancellation of plants and incurring of huge losses for the people of this province.

It’s hard for me to believe that a similar examination of emails and texts from current government MPPs wouldn’t show the same kind of fear in the lead-up to the reversal. You don’t snatch $8 billion worth of profits out of the hands of your friends, people who show up for your daughter’s wedding, unless there is, on the other side, a powerful political motivator, like a career-ending event at the hands of your angry voters. If fear motivated the reversal, it would be interesting to delve into the records to see what motivated the savaging of the greenbelt in the first place.

I accept that the buck stops with the Premier. He said it himself.

No one buys the fairy tale that this had anything to do with the housing crisis. We need to find out, what did the Premier order, and why did he order it?

The third thing that became clear in the course of that inquiry—and that could be made clear in the course of another inquiry—was that the Liberal government knew very early on the scale of the cost to ratepayers of Ontario. The chief of staff to the Minister of Energy made inquiries when this whole thing was about to go forward, when the whole idea of cancelling the plants was first promoted, and some prescient bureaucrat suggested the cost was in about a $1-billion range. I don’t know who that bureaucrat was, but whoever they are, man, they knew energy costs.

It’s hard for me to believe that with this greenbelt scandal, there were not senior political and bureaucratic staff who didn’t do the rough math themselves—maybe the developers did it for them—to see what kind of staggering gift of public value was being made to those who had the chance to get a piece of wedding cake served by the Premier. The public deserves to know. Cake and billions—what an amazing combination; what a wedding gift. What did the government know about the value they were giving away, and when did they know it?

The fourth piece of clarity that came out of that gas plants scandal inquiry—and, I think, would come out here—was a look into the operations of government itself, which was something that few people ever get a chance to do. At one point, we were given access to the interviews of senior bureaucrats and political staff by the OPP. In one interview, a senior bureaucrat talked about his concern that the top political staff in the Premier’s office didn’t keep records of their daily meetings. The chief of staff’s senior people would meet every day. They had one sheet of paper with headings like “Shutting Down Hamilton” or “Making St. Catharines a Free-Enterprise Zone”—I don’t know. There were no records kept of any decisions or discussion. That was it. That’s how the province was being run. I have to say, this was so noteworthy that in the final report on the inquiry, the Conservatives put in their own dissenting opinion. They quoted from the OPP interviews. They went out of their way to quote the cabinet secretary talking about the lack of Liberal records. Here is the text: Cabinet secretary Peter Wallace told investigators that he warned David Livingston, McGuinty’s chief of staff, that “the only organizations that did not maintain records were criminal organizations” and that “a practice of no record-keeping would be embarrassing”—the second one, yes, it would be amazingly embarrassing; the other would have a greater punch, I thought. I have to ask myself, with the way that the Integrity Commissioner describes the avoiding of government phones and emails to communicate about these parcels of land, with missing calendar entries, with the use of envelopes full of plans given out at events, what would that civil servant say today? What would a legislative committee find with regard to the Premier, his ministers and his operatives with the questions—what did they delete, and when did they delete it?

As I go door to door in my riding talking to my constituents, the questions come up constantly: What really happened with the greenbelt? Who did this? They know, generally, the Premier was running things, but through what persons did he do it? Who benefited? Why wasn’t this stopped? Why wasn’t it stopped internally when people realized, “This is bad news”—aside from the fact that there were other considerations, not just bad news.

A public inquiry with the power to compel evidence could give us answers to many of these questions—maybe not all, but to many of these questions. We need to get those answers. Let’s get going with this committee of inquiry.