The damning report from Ontario’s auditor general on Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Fair Hydro Plan isn’t really about hydro at all.
It’s about truth. Or more specifically, truth as perceived by bean counters.
This is not a difference of opinion between accountants, Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk said in her blistering remarks as she released her special report.
WATCH: The Liberal Fair Hydro Plan explained.
“This is far more serious.”
Serious because this is what it sounds like when doves cry. Or rather accountants.
What Lysyk is warning about is actually a tried and true way of managing provincial finances, just not on the scale of the hydro plan. The government does not want and does not need to carry every bit of debt on its financial bottom line.
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The war between Lysyk and the Liberals is whether the Fair Hydro Plan and its use of Ontario Power Generation as a debt vehicle is a sign of devious politicking or just the way things get done.
As the cliché goes, the first casualty of war is truth.
WATCH: Auditor says Liberals are hiding the true cost of the hydro plan.
The Liberals have gone out of their way to paint the auditor as someone who is singularly offside on these key matters of accounting principles. The Ministry of Energy went so far as to personally contact journalists the day before her report was released to say the auditor’s interpretation is flawed.
To be clear, this is a report the ministry had already read and knew was explosive.
When I told Lysyk during her news conference that the ministry had been questioning her basic accounting assumptions prior to the release of her report, she seemed both surprised and resigned to the matter.
“The public have a right to know the bottom line,” she said.
READ MORE: Who do you believe, the auditor general or the Liberal government?
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The bottom line seems to be an increasingly frustrated auditor becoming increasingly activist.
Lysyk first was told by the Liberals her office doesn’t understand the complexities of the energy sector, and then Wynne changed advertising rules that, according to Lysyk, makes the auditor’s office a rubber stamp for partisan ads on the taxpayer dime.
Her reaction has to been to lower the public relations boom on the Liberal government with withering verbal fire.
“There is still time to do the right thing,” Lysyk concluded in her remarks.
Doing the right thing, according to Lysyk, would mean Wynne undoing a plan the Liberals have placed all their electoral chips on.
It’s not going to happen.
Both sides have lined up experts to corroborate their interpretations of the truth, and discerning where confrontational politics ends and reality begins is next to impossible.
The only clear thing is that truth, wherever it might be, is taking a beating.
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