On The Gasplant Thing

Ouch.  Dumbest thing the OLP ever did, was cancel those plants.  Cost a fortune, as everyone can plainly see, and really gave the anti-Green Energy Act opponents their only half-decent argument: money is obviously not a problem, and you were willing to listen to NIMBYs down in the GTA, so why won't you listen to us? As an issue going forward--who knows?  I'd say it helps Horwath more than Hudak, because Hudak is sad and his platform is a tea-party style attack on Canadian values that won't resonate.  But who can say?  This one has been in the news forever.  The story was told long ago: a former Premier blew a lot of money to win a couple of ridings he would have won anyway; the new Premier has apologized and vowed to move forward.  That may just be enough.

Cavoukian Fed A Line Of BS

JIMMO is still talking  OLP "cover-up", but his account of how files get stored and backed-up sounds right enough, as does his assertion that Anne Cavoukian has been misinformed re how difficult it is to recover the lost emails at the center of the l'affair de gas plant:



And in fact I would second his point at the end: that an independent data recovery team might still be able to pull lost data from the servers in question, and therefore one should be called in.  That's because I suspect that were the contents of these emails to be made known they would tell us little more than what we have already discovered, which is that the OLP panicked towards the end of the last election campaign and blew a ton of money to save a couple of ridings they would have won anyway.  In other words, there are no secrets hidden in them; what the Libs did was all done pretty much up front and in public.

Incidentally, the video also seems to clarify a point WK made a few days ago:

[Cavoukian] pays no heed to the fact that records of emails concerning government business were kept by officials, and/or the government server, for many months and ultimately deleted only by them...

What happened on the hard-drive of some Premier's aide is far less important to the ultimate fate of the emails than what happened on the governments' servers.  Whether or not emails were deleted from personal PCs to keep in-boxes tidy (or to cover something up--who knows?) would have no bearing on whether they were kept or not on the servers they passed through.  And archiving material on the servers is someone else's responsibility (not our hypothetical aide's); if there was any failure of diligence, that's where it would have occurred.

First Ontario Poll Post Election Shows Prospects, Problems

 The McGuinty Liberals would probably win a majority today, but that damned Mississaugua gas plant could become an albatross around their necks. 

Cancelling the thing at the very last moment seemed the Libs one campaign misstep (that and McGuinty's arm waving at the debate), although it didn't really harm them much at the time.  When you build your campaign around pandering to NIMBYs, as Hudak did, you can't really complain when your opponent turns around and does it better.

And its sad to see NIMBYism come to the 416; I guess its easy to be green when all the turbines/plants are located in someone else's riding.