Freedom Party of Ontario
- MEDIA RELEASE -
For immediate release

Health Care is the Model:
Energy on Basis of Alleged Need, Not Ability to Pay

May 26, 2016, London, Ontario – Call it “socialized energy” or “energy care": energy on the basis of need, not on the basis of ability to pay.  In an interview on the globally-broadcasted radio program “Just Right” today, Freedom Party of Ontario leader Paul McKeever warned that that is the real purpose of the Kathleen Wynne government’s various “climate” policies - including cap-and-trade, ending natural gas home-heating, subsidizing electric cars and charging stations, etc..  [Note: That part of the interview starts at 16 minutes, 11 seconds].


McKeever asserted that the mandatory participants in Ontario’s cap and trade system will be the competitors of the Ontario government, which supplies electricity.  Those competitors notably will include companies involved in the provision of energy to the two major consumer needs: natural gas (home heating) and oil (automobile fuel).  Via cap and trade, the government will be “stealing from their competitors”, says McKeever.

At the same time, says McKeever, the government plans to use taxpayer earnings - and the money stolen from the government’s competitors - to convert private-sector natural gas (home heating) and oil (transportation) customers to government-sector electricity customers with such things as expensive replacements of natural gas furnaces with electrical home heating systems; electric car subsides, and grants for the installation of automobile electrical charging stations.  


Fighting climate change is the “pretext”, says McKeever, for setting up a government monopoly not just on electricity in particular, but on energy in general.  The government wants a system in which they can tell the public that:

“...if they want to power their cars or if they want to heat their homes, they have to 'buy' [the energy] from the government.  Sound familiar?  Health care.  Health care is that model.  The only payor is the government.  It’s all taxpayer funded.  The government doles [electricity] out not according to who paid for it but according to who, allegedly, needs it.  And I think that’s the end game here.  Politicize the supply of energy.  Hold the 'commanding heights' of the economy not just for economic reasons but for political reasons, because as soon as you do that you can make up any political system you want.  For example you can say that Group X - as defined by their genetics, or defined by their participation in a particular religion, or defined by their preferred artistic habits; whatever it is - they get more energy than the person who isn’t in that group because, well, ‘we say so’, ‘our ideology says so’…As soon as the price system is taken out of the system, it’s all about political will, who has the political pull, who gets the energy - the only energy, all of it supplied by the provincial government.

McKeever warns that, inevitably, the result will be energy rationing:

“What the real issue is right now, when they talk about the climate: it’s not the climate.  It’s about creating an electricity government monopoly…on the health care model.  In other words, you aren’t going to be paying for energy in the future, you’re going to be paying taxes, and you’re going to be getting the energy that the government doles out to you as they see fit, on the basis of ‘need’.  And as the system continues to crumble - because it’s no longer making a profit and can’t keep up with repairs and et cetera - it will turn to rationing.  This will happen in anything they touch and turn into this 'on the basis of need and not on the basis of ability to pay’ system, because they’ve taken-out the price system."

McKeever asserts that “The real key” of the Smart Meter program is that it will allow the government to ration electricity on political grounds.

McKeever explains that we’ve seen an attempt like this before.  In the late 1950s, the introduction of natural gas by TransCanada Pipelines - a private, Texan-founded company with funding from the federal Liberal government of the time - scuppered the Progressive Conservative Ontario government’s plans to replace privately-sold coal and oil (the preferred home heating energy sources of that day) with government-supplied electricity.  The result, says McKeever, was the Progressive Conservatives’ 20 year “Live Better Electrically” campaign, in which dirty coal and hyper-expensive nuclear electricity generation stations were built to flood the market with cheap electricity, leaving us with smog and billions in hydro debt.

McKeever provided the “Just Right” program with a set of juxtaposed audio clips demonstrating that the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives are singing from the same hymn book with this plan.

In the clips, Kathleen Wynne is heard explaining to Ontario’s 2015 “Climate Summit of the Americas” that by taking this sort of alleged “climate” action now, we can avoid “inequality in the world”.  PC leader Patrick Brown is heard at the 2016 PC Party AGM putting the same wealth-redistribution message thusly: “Compassion and prosperity go hand-in-hand: a green environment is necessary for economic growth”.


The Just Right radio program is heard around the world every Thursday.  An online archive of all of its shows is available at justrightmedia.org.

 

For further details, contact:
 
Paul McKeever, Leader - Freedom Party of Ontario
 

Freedom Party of Ontario
240 Commissioners Road West
London, Ontario
CANADA N6J 1Y1