When are we going to learn? Another expensive boondoggle from Ontario's Premier

by ScottK
(Merrickville)

So Dalton McGuinty's solution to 'green enegy' is to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to lure South Korean company Samsung to Ontario.

Samsung is receiving an 'incentive' - i.e. BRIBE - in the amount of $437 million to set up green energy facilities in Ontario. This is supposed to be a good deal, because 1,440 jobs will be 'created'.

A little math shows this amounts to more than $300,0000 per job. Congratulations, Dalton! A brilliant piece of negotiation, with my money!

Let's recap, shall we? first, our leaders threw billions of dollars at car manufacturers (also foreign-owned) to build more cars nobody wants. Now we are bribing in another foreign company, that pushes Canadian and Ontario green energy companies to the 'back of the pack'.

Samsung get's first crack at this lucrative market, wherein the Ontario government pays many times the going rate for green energy. And they get priority access to the distribution grid, which has limited capacity and is the bottleneck in the process.

Now a rational person might have thought, 'if the breakdown-prone, inefficient distribution grid is a large part of the problem (remember Ice Storm 98?) then maybe we should be encouraging local generation of power'?

But wait! What would happen to all those $100,000+ /year jobs at Ontario Hydro if we all had control of our own energy production? We can't let that happen! Full steam ahead, towards centralization and the past!

When are we going to learn the lesson, people? There is no more expensive, inefficient, and ultimately ineffective way to to ANYTHING than to have the government do it. This includes 'job creation', or any other scheme to distribute the wealth.

When are citizens going to understand that governments don't create wealth, they consume it and (at best) then spread a little bit of it around.

This latest deal makes it apparent, once again, that solutions to the economic crisis, or climate crisis, or any other large-scale systemic problem will not come from our fearless leaders. Their only answer is to throw more of our money at a problem.

And they absolutely don't want to admit that the days of enormous, centralized solutions are OVER. Their whole power base is dependent on this model, and they are terrified it will become irrelevant.

So wake up, and realize that your government is bereft of ideas, and incapable of solving ANYTHING. Real solutions will come from communities, individuals and companies that actually DO create something of value.

Look around, see what you can do to be more self-sufficient - in transportation, energy, food, whatever - and get started. Because when the compost really hits the fan, you will be relying on yourself and your community for survival.