Selling off what the taxpayers have already paid for...

For 109 years, since 1906, the central electricity generation and distribution system in Ontario has been a publicly-owned provincial utility. During that time the taxpayers of Ontario have poured billions into the infrastructure of it and its operation and maintenance. Now, the politicians want to sell it off to the private sector, because they don't know how to run it properly,  and they refuse to learn.

Ontario had a central transmission grid long before that became the standard for similar utilities elsewhere, and we literally wrote the book on hydro-electric generation and its operations. Our in-house training programs have been copied and used by other provincial utilities such as B.C. Hydro, to train their employees, because, as I said, we wrote the book, and our training courses very completely covered the subjects involved. Many power station and system operators all over the country have been trained using Ontario's training materials, and some of us who began our careers there moved on to other utilities later in our careers, and we're aware of all this. This is something which ought to be retained as a publicly-owned utility and not sold off to the highest bidder, or to some politician's friends, for fun and profit. We not only built that system, we own it, and we ought to keep it. There's nothing wrong with it that better management wouldn't fix.

My 'Letter to The Editor' at the Globe and Mail today:-