Election season is coming and Dwight Duncan claims he knows what this election is about.

Election season is coming and Dwight Duncan claims he knows what this election is about.

1.       He claims it’s about healthcare.

This is his government’s record on healthcare:

- 1 billion dollars wasted on E-Health scandal with only a small percentage of health files actually converted to electronic form.

-$250 million spent on another level of healthcare bureaucracy the LHIN’s staffed with you guessed it Liberal Party loyalists.

-The Ontario Health Premium or tax or fee or donation depending on the du jour; this money grab goes to the general fund.

      2.   He claims it’s about energy.

His government took a power grid with 130% power generation capacity which was affordable and abundant for industry and residents and replaced it with one of rationing and exorbitant.

Dwight has claimed had he not intervened that we’d have rolling blackouts.  In fact, he was frightened to leave the province. Had he left the province and travelled down to Ohio where the 2003 power outage originated, he would have learned it was from a software bug, known as a race condition, existed in energy management system.

The power outage wasn’t caused because of an absence of Liberal backed high priced Solar and Wind projects, rather it was an absence of clear lines of demarcation in the grid.

Dwight would have you believe otherwise.

3.       Then there’s that pesky claim which pops up every election; we are really going to phase out coal this time.  The facts tell a different story.

Coal consumption and production is up 29% this year but the claims continue for the children of course.

Dwight’s new booklet he mailed out admits there will be a 70% rise on electrical rates over 20 years.

This, again, is a best case scenario.

What Dwight fails to calculate is how much industry will pack up and leave Ontario over the coming years when his energy plans come to fruition and how his government would have to spread that revenue loss over existing customers to recoup fixed costs.

4.       He claims it’s about jobs.

Better than any tax cut to individuals or industry to spur economic growth would be to have affordable and abundant electricity Dwight has pursued the opposite and the result will be a stagnant economy.

Had Dwight’s Liberals just pursued tax cuts for the Ontario’s existing manufacturing sector, instead of driving up the cost of electricity and taxes to experiment with his new green manufacturing sector, maybe Ontario wouldn’t have become a have not province on his watch. We learned this week in the Windsor Star that he promised 50,000 GREEN jobs by 2012. However, there are at best 1500 heavily tax payer subsidized jobs.

This government isn’t only running one of Ontario’s largest fiscal deficits, but they are running a truth deficit as well.

The recession began when many Ontarians lost their jobs: the recovery begins when the Liberals lose theirs.

Matt Ford