Tag Archives: Liberal

News

Ontario government gives IKEA $685,000 per year in solar power subsidies

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Political Map of Canada

Story from the National Post. (H/T Small Dead Animals via ECM)

Excerpt:

The Swedish retail giant IKEA announced yesterday it will invest $4.6-million to install 3,790 solar panels on three Toronto area stores, giving IKEA the electric-power-producing capacity of 960,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. According to IKEA, that’s enough electricity to power 100 homes. Amazing development. Even more amazing is the economics of this project. Under the Ontario government’s feed-in-tariff solar power scheme, IKEA will receive 71.3¢ for each kilowatt of power produced, which works out to about $6,800 a year for each of the 100 hypothetical homes. Since the average Toronto home currently pays about $1,200 for the same quantity of electricity, that implies that IKEA is being overpaid by $5,400 per home equivalent.

Welcome to the wonderful world of green economics and the magical business of carbon emission reduction. Each year, IKEA will receive $684,408 under Premier Dalton McGuinty’s green energy monster — for power that today retails for about $115,000. At that rate, IKEA will recoup $4.6-million in less than seven years — not bad for an investment that can be amortized over 20.

No wonder solar power is such a hot industry. No wonder, too, that the province of Ontario is in a headlong rush into a likely economic crisis brought on by skyrocketing electricity prices. To make up the money paid to IKEA to promote itself as a carbon-free zone, Ontario consumers and industries are on their way to experiencing the highest electricity rates in North America, if not most of the world.
The government’s regulator, the Ontario Energy Board, has prepared secret forecasts of how much Ontario consumers are going to have to pay for electricity over the next five years. The government won’t allow the report to be released. The next best estimate comes from Aegent Energy Advisors Inc., in a study it did for the Canadian Manufactures and Exporters group. Residential rates are expected to jump by 60% between 2010 and 2015. Industrial customers will be looking at a 55% increase.

Going back to 2003, based on numbers dug up by consultant Tom Adams, the price of residential electricity in Ontario hovered around 8.5¢ a kWh in 2003 — the first year of the McGuinty Liberal regime. By 2015, Aegent Energy estimates the price will be up to 21¢, an increase of 135%. Doubling the price of electricity in a decade is no way to spur growth and investment. In this age of global economic competition IKEA may end up with fewer sales of its Billy bookshelves in Toronto because its customers will be bogged down with soaring power bills and a sliding economy.

I wonder how the taxpayers of Ontario, who have just been whacked with the HST, feel about this government waste. By the way, the Ontario Liberal Party is basically analogous the Democrat Party. So this is is going to happen to us, too, if they get their way.

News

Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper vows to end long-gun registry

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Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Here’s the story from the National Post.

Excerpt:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowed yesterday the Conservative party “will not rest” until the day it abolishes the long-gun registry.

[…]Mr. Harper predicted the “registry will someday be abolished” because it will continually be opposed by the people who understand it–whom he identified as “rural Canadians, hunters, outdoors men and women (and) police officers.”These people will never accept this registry because they know it is ineffective and wasteful. And the party I lead will not rest until the day it is abolished.”

See, the interesting thing is that this is exactly the kind of issue that Harper can use to drive rural voters, some of who vote Liberal or Socialist (NDP), towards the federal Conservative Party in the next federal election. Canadian rural voters tend to be further to the left than American rural voters.

Look at how the left-wing parties are squirming:

The Harper government has gone on the offensive this week in trying to draw attention to Liberal and NDP MPs who were once opponents of the long-gun registry but are now poised to vote in favour of it. Government House leader John Baird has said those MPs have been pressured by “Toronto elites” to switch their votes and will be held accountable by voters in the next election.

In Thunder Bay, NDP MPs John Rafferty and Bruce Hyer, on record as registry opponents, have yet to declare their intentions for next Wednesday’s vote on Conservative MP Candice Hoeppner’s bill to kill the registry.

The bill handily passed a preliminary vote last November, with the help of 12 New Democrats and eight Liberals. The margin this time is expected to be razor thin. The Liberals have been ordered to vote along party lines, while the New Democrats have said they have the six vote-changers they believe they need to save the registry.

And fiscal conservatives also hate the long-gun registry. It was supposed to cost 2 million dollars to implement, but it actually has cost over 2 billion dollars. What a waste! And with no demonstrable effect on crime rates, since law-abiding hunters don’t commit crimes.

News

Obama to appoint anti-business radical to regulate businesses?

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From ABC News. (H/T Verum Serum)

Excerpt:

President Obama will announce this week that Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law School professor who first proposed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will be named to a special position reporting to both him and to the Treasury Department and tasked with heading the effort to get the new federal agency standing, a knowledgeable Democrat told ABC News.

Warren currently chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel of the Troubled Assets Relief Program and has been seen by many on the Left as a force for greater accountability and transparency, and a check against the forces in the Obama administration more closely allied with the financial sector. Many officials in that sector eye her warily as too anti-business…

Naming Warren as an assistant or counselor to both the president and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner would allow the president to bypass a Senate confirmation process that could prove lengthy and contentious.

Morgen writes:

The official White House announcement tomorrow will no doubt emphasize Warren’s role in originating the idea for this agency, and her impressive academic credentials. (Credential number one – she’s a “dear friend” of Obama’s dating back to law school.)

But expect there to be major fireworks over this appointment. Just how anti-business is Warren? Here is only a preview, from her blog on TPM in 2005 (emphasis added):

The middle class is being carved up as the main dish in a corporate feast.  Strugging with flat incomes and rising costs for housing, health care, transportation, child care and taxes (yes, taxes), these folks are under a lot of financial strain.  And big corporate interests, led by the consumer finance industry, are devouring families and spitting out the bones.

Well, I think it’s safe to say she isn’t a fan of this particular industry, if not corporations in general. But with the Consumer Financial Protection Agency charged with regulating everything from mortgages to credit cards, and the companies who market them, you would think it would be helpful to have someone with at least a semblance of impartiality heading it up.

Apparently the White House disagrees.

This is why corporations aren’t hiring. They’re waiting for anti-business Obama to get voted out in 2012.