Liberal Jim Bradley looks like he's got something to hide

MPP Jim Bradley:

The St. Catharines Standard (Jan.30, 2008) wrote in “Ontario premier blasts Harper Tories on environment”: “Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty says the federal government suffers from a “poverty of ambition” when it comes to fighting the global issue of climate change.”

Did you read the part where Federal Environment Minister John Baird said the Ontario premier should look at his own environmental record before criticizing Ottawa? Baird mentioned that your coal-fired electricity-generators have not been closed yet, and mentioned your Liberal’s stance not to accept California-style emission standards.

I think your Liberal government suffers from a ‘poverty of truth’, as well as an ‘abundance of hypocrisy’. I bring the following essay for your attention:

Here’s a nice lie told by Dalton McGuinty to Ontarians in May 2003: “By 2007, we’re going to have cleaner air in this province come hell or high water.” (Globe and Mail, Jun.10, 2006)

McGuinty railed that he would close all of Ontario’s coal-generated electricity plants by last year – well, it’s 2008 and that promise turned into a Liberal lie. McGuinty’s Liberals in 2003 even wanted to ban the export of non-emergency coal-fired electricity. (St. Catharines Standard, Jul.17, 2007)

This was partly due to their fear mongering - in opposition - regarding coal emission dangers: why produce more than you have to? was their thinking. Of course, limiting our production to bare minimums only made it easier to have to buy from U.S. coal fired producers.

The St. Catharines Standard (Jun.21, 2002) reported Liberal MPP Jim Bradley asked Energy and Environment Minister Chris Stockwell to stop selling coal-fired power to the U.S. on non-emergency days.

"If we shut them down, we would actually put people in a blackout situation in the province. None of us want that, [Stockwell] said" .

The Standard wrote: “The Liberal environment critic and St. Catharines MPP [Bradley] said Thursday that Stockwell is favouring energy interests over environmental ones. "As minster of energy, he has an obligation ... to provide as much power to the people of Ontario as cheaply as possible," Bradley said at Queen's Park. "As minister of the environment, his obligation is to ensure that we have clean, breathable air. In my view, the minister does not have an objective opportunity to reduce air pollutants in Ontario because one is a conflicting interest over the other."

How disingenuous when you look back from 2008 at how the Liberals lied about what they were going to achieve. Bradley’s Liberals haven’t closed all the coal fired plants, nor have they at least installed scrubbers on them for the interim. Maybe Jim Bradley can reveal how many people his Liberals made sick since 2003 with their environmental deceit? Liberal promises of supposed "clean air" were nothing more than vote-grabbing hot-air.

The Hamilton Spectator (Dec.11, 1998) wrote of Jim Bradley fan David Suzuki saying: "Air pollution is responsible for 6,000 premature deaths a year in Ontario alone." Of course, now that Jim Bradley is in power, not in opposition, and Jim Bradley's Liberals have closed no other plants except Lakeview (whose closing was set by the previous Conservatives), have Suzuki's death-figures changed? How many premature deaths in Ontario today are due solely to Liberal political posturing and misrepresentation?

The St. Catharines Standard (Jun.5, 2002) wrote: “Bradley had asked Stockwell about the amount of pollution produced by coal-fired power plants in Ontario.

By way of reply, Stockwell said Bradley was trying to push Ontario into a technological and economic dark age. "If we listen to the thinking of the critic for the environment, the only way he wants to (decrease pollution) is we close down all our infrastructure, close down all our plants, close down all our manufacturing, lay everybody off and put them on welfare," he said. "We would be like Guam." Guam, located in the south Pacific, was purchased by the U.S. in 1899 and, therefore, included in the report. "It was just so ludicrous an answer, such a Neanderthal answer," Bradley said in an interview Tuesday. "That was the kind of argument put up before environment control years and years ago in very backward jurisdictions where the polluters had the government in their back pocket."”

There goes ole "pipsqueak" Bradley again (as Ralph Klein fondly once referred to him), with his “Neanderthal” condemnation – when, as we well have since seen, his Liberals were nothing more than environmental posers, lying their way into power.

Has anyone today in 2008, "asked" Jim Bradley "about the amount of pollution produced" from his Liberal-controlled coal-fired power stacks?

Back on May 12, 1989 the Toronto Star wrote: "Judging by his inept performance in the Legislature this week, Environment Minister Jim Bradley looks a little like a man who has something to hide. He has enraged the opposition with his wordy, vague responses to allegations that fuel tainted with toxic waste was being smuggled into Canada from the United States."

Who can hide the fact today that Jim Bradley and his Liberals have done nothing about the Nanticoke coal fired plant?

Continued the St Catharines Standard (Jun.5, 2002): “Bradley's question had come on the heels of a new North American Free Trade Agreement report that said Ontario is the third worst polluting region in North America, behind only Texas and Ohio. He repeated his longstanding call that the government convert coal-fired power plants, such as the one in Nanticoke that contributes to Niagara's smog each summer, to natural gas to reduce air pollution.”

So why is Jim Bradley hiding from his B.S.bluster now? Why isn’t Bradley repeating his wordy rejoinders, his “longstanding” calls, to close and convert Nanticoke now? What is Bradley hiding today - the economic costs of shutting down coal without having viable alternatives in place – as Stockwell plainly said six years ago? How’s Bradley’s Ontario now…still behind Texas and Ohio? Or does Neanderthal Bradley want our economy to become like Guam’s?

Bradley once compared Conservative Energy Minister Jim Wilson to Phineas T. Bluster from Howdy Doody (St. Catharines Standard, Oct.24, 2001). How clever…yet now it is Bradley who strangely resembles Bluster, carrying a sack full of stinking Liberal doody. Jimbo has turned into a McGuinty marionette, full of contradictory jibber-jabber.

Bradley was in a Conservative-government-initiated committee reporting on alternate energy plans which recommended the phasing out of coal fired plants by 2015 (Hamilton Spectator, Jun.10, 2002). But then, during the 2003 election, the Liberals recklessly speeded up that timetable, in retrospect, solely because of their lust for political power.

Having failed to do what they promised in 2003, the Liberals “have now drafted a regulation to close all coal fired plants by New Year’s Eve 2014, which means any subsequent government will have to change the law if it wants to keep the plants open.” (St. Catharines Standard, Jul.26, 2007)

This was a cute pre-2007-election gambit for the Grits – this “law” means the Liberals can safely fiddle around for another almost four years, till the 2011 election, as they have done over the last four years, since 2003; leaving a subsequent government only three years to accomplish the task.

The Sarnia Observer (Jul.26, 2007) wrote: "A CIBC report is predicting electricity costs could rise up to 70 per cent when Ontario mothballs its four coal-fired plants but McGuinty said that pales in comparison to the cost of doing nothing about global warming."

But why should Jim Bradley (“a left leaning Liberal”, as Ian Urquhart described him, Toronto Star, Jun.10, 2002) care about costs? Jim has his wealthy pension unlocked, Jim has his nice salary-increase, Jim has his nice shiny black Malibu, that he was bragging about when he was shilling about ‘buying GM’ at the CAW all-candidates meeting during the election…Jim has it good. A 70% increase in hydro costs won’t bother Bradley much, will it?

The Hamilton Spectator (Jul.19, 2002) wrote "the cost of switching Nanticoke and the other fossil-fuelled plants to cleaner fuels such as natural gas is formidable. OPG estimates it would cost $3 billion to replace Nanticoke's coal generation with natural gas; to replace all of the fossil-fuelled plants would cost $6 billion. But the cost of smog and poor air quality is equally daunting. On top of an estimated 1,900 premature deaths a year, the Ontario Medical Association estimates that health care, lost work time, and related expenses run into billions of dollars annually."

The Sarnia Observer quoted McGuinty on July 26, 2007 still saying: "The single greatest contributor to greenhouse gases in the province of Ontario is coal-fired generation so we're going to do something about that."

So why didn't the Liberals do what they said they were going to do in government, given all the information that was appearing during the time they were in opposition. Surely, they had a plan, didn't they?

The Hamilton Spectator (Jul.10, 2005) wrote: "A 10-year outlook, prepared by experts at the IESO and released last week, warned that the province's plan to phase out coal generating plants by 2007 "represents the largest and most significant electricity system change ever undertaken in Ontario ... (and) involves significant risks and challenges ..." "

Shouldn't the McGuinty brain-trust already have taken this into consideration prior to making rash promises during their election campaign in 2003??

So, to prepare for the Oct.2007 election, the Liberals had to admit their lying promises were just that.

The Globe and Mail reported in “Ontario reneges on coal pledge” (Jun.10, 2006):

“The Ontario government retreated yesterday from a campaign promise and conceded what has been obvious to its critics for some time: it can't meet a self-imposed deadline to shut down the province's aging coal-burning electricity-generating plants.

Energy Minister Dwight Duncan said new information reveals that the province doesn't have enough electricity to keep the lights on if it stops burning coal by 2009.

"This is a setback, there's no doubt about it," he said in an interview yesterday.”

A “setback”!!? Really!!?

And just when did the Liberal geniuses come to that conclusion??!!

Un-flicking believeable! It’s like Duncan, Phineas T. Bradley, and their company, JUST FOUND THIS OUT in 2006!!!?

How can it be a setback, when the whole proposition was essentially an unattainable goal: in other words, a practical lie?

It’s like Jim Bradley simply and arrogantly didn’t care to understand what Chris Stockwell was plainly telling him, back in 2002!!

Randy Schelhas wrote in the Brantford Expositor (Jul.16, 2007):

“Many people will remember that 2014 was the earliest possible closing date articulated by the Progressive Conservatives during the 2003 election campaign.

At that time the Liberals claimed they would close all of Ontario's coal-fired electrical generation by 2007 in spite of widespread media reports in which energy professionals were agreeing with the PCs.

There are two possibilities. Either Dalton McGuinty and his Energy Minister Dwight Duncan are extremely stupid or they knowingly lied in order to win the 2003 election.”

Yet, astoundingly, Ontario re-elected them AGAIN in 2007: no matter how they cheat, spin, or lie.

*

Mr. Bradley, do you have any comments on the issues raised in this letter? Or, now that you've been elected, do you feel you can arrogantly sail through the next four years ignoring your constituents?

Also, again I ask, will you be calling for the Ombudsman to investigate the Niagara Health System's inordinately high mortality-rate, the third-highest in Canada?

Asking the Ministry of Health or the local LHIN to look into the NHS's 'organizational' structure is an inadequate response; that's like having the fox "investigate" the henhouse.

Mr. Bradley, you haven't given the people of St. Catharines an explanation for what is going on here in your Liberal health-care monopoly.

While your Liberals sit on billions of dollars of tax-surplus, the NHS has recently said they are underfunded. What are your Liberals doing about that?

Is "climate change" (whatever that means when Liberals say it) a higher priority for you than health-care?

Perhaps your Liberals also suffer from a 'poverty of priority'. Dalton McGuinty recently wrote a guest editorial-page column in the St. Catharines Standard (Jan. 19, 2008) where he didn't once even mention the word 'health-care'.

As always, I look forward to your (possible) response.