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The first thing Doug Ford would do as premier of Ontario is get rid of the chief executive of Hydro One, he said Thursday, a simple, dumb move that wouldn’t lower the price of electricity.
Mayo Schmidt, who’s had the job two-and-a-half years, was paid $6.2 million last year, making him the best-compensated public-sector worker in Ontario by a lot. Maybe that’s all you need to know.
“Nobody, but nobody should get rich off of ripping off the taxpayers,” Ford said, in a short news conference called for the purpose. “It is morally indefensible, at a time when seniors are fearful of heating their own homes, when businesses are closing down and good jobs are moving out of our province, and when taxpayers are facing financial hardships, all due to skyrocketing hydro bills, that this board and this CEO are laughing themselves to the bank.”
Schmidt has to go, Ford said. Technically, as a minority owner of Hydro One now, the provincial government can’t fire him. But it did retain the power to fire the utility company’s board when it sold off a majority share, so if the board won’t fire Schmidt, Ford will fire the board and replace its members with people who will. Or maybe he’ll fire the board regardless. To be honest, he left it a little unclear.
“You can take this to the bank. The CEO’s gone and the board’s gone. We need to start respecting the taxpayers,” Ford said, sounding plain enough. “The $6-million man is gone. The party’s over, it’s done. The party’s over with the taxpayers’ money.”
He turned over specifics to Tory energy critic Todd Smith, who talked about giving the Hydro One board an ultimatum and maybe keeping them on if they complied.
Honestly, Hydro One serves a public function and selling it was short-sighted. It freed up a bunch of cash but Hydro One makes money and selling half of it to the private sector meant selling half its profits forever.
Mayo Schmidt in 2012, when he was chief executive of Viterra.
But here’s the thing: Mayo Schmidt is not the problem here. The province hired him to lead Hydro One after the privatization was already underway. He was already rich: his previous big job was leading Viterra, a grain-handling company descended from the iconic Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, out of profound financial decrepitude and into a $6-billion acquisition by commodities multinational Glencore. Canadian Business magazine called him Canada’s best CEO in 2009. In his last year in that gig, before the sellout, Schmidt was paid $5.1 million.
Transforming Hydro One from a ramshackle public utility everyone loves to hate into an effective private corporation is an almost identical sort of job. Schmidt has a proven history of being good at it, and $6 million is what he costs (a big chunk of that was bonus pay, after share prices rose, which is the chief executive’s job).
Public records show him as a donor to no political party or candidate. He’s not even an Ontario guy — he’s from Kansas and spent most of his career in Saskatchewan. They didn’t find him napping on a couch at Liberal HQ.
So how will firing Schmidt lower hydro bills?
“I’m gonna tell you, we’re going to achieve that,” Ford said. “Over the period of the next 55, 56 days (until the June election), we’re going to roll out how we’re gonna start putting money in the taxpayer’s pocket instead of the government’s pocket.”
Translation: it won’t. If what you want is to see a rich guy get punched in the face over the price of hydro, Ford’s fist is clenched for you. You’ll get the same bill next month and corporate Canada will think the Ontario government has lost its mind, but maybe it’ll feel good for a little bit.
We used to radically underpay for electricity and that left us with a mess that higher prices have paid to fix. If we really, really want cheaper electricity, we can go back to starving the system and start the cycle again. We could plan to stop using nuclear power, which is reliable but the stations are expensive to build and maintain. Or we could go to war with power-sector unions, whose members are collectively paid a whole lot more than Mayo Schmidt. No party proposes any of these risky, difficult ideas.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne announces cuts to hydro rates during a press conference in Toronto, Ont. on Thursday March 2, 2017.
Instead, the Liberals have already lowered prices by 25 per cent by just borrowing money to cut them, knowing it’ll mean higher bills later. Wynne appeals to “generational fairness,” spreading out the costs of fixing up our formerly dirtier and much shakier electricity system over more years, but it still comes down to putting more on credit to pay off in the future.
After years of harassing the Liberals for their ineptitude on hydro, Patrick Brown’s “People’s Guarantee” took that one step further. He’d have kept the Liberal plan and moved more hydro-related expenses into the government budget. Hydro bills would be lower, taxes would be higher. Whoop-de-do.
And the New Democrats want to buy back control of Hydro One at massive expense, see if they can talk the feds into taking sales tax off electricity, and then convene a panel to study the problem.
All of these ideas are cosmetic. Fiddling around the edges at best. They’d still be harder than firing Schmidt or the Hydro One board or both, and would do more good.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Mayo Schmidt, who’s had the job two-and-a-half years, was paid $6.2 million last year, making him the best-compensated public-sector worker in Ontario by a lot. Maybe that’s all you need to know.
“Nobody, but nobody should get rich off of ripping off the taxpayers,” Ford said, in a short news conference called for the purpose. “It is morally indefensible, at a time when seniors are fearful of heating their own homes, when businesses are closing down and good jobs are moving out of our province, and when taxpayers are facing financial hardships, all due to skyrocketing hydro bills, that this board and this CEO are laughing themselves to the bank.”
Schmidt has to go, Ford said. Technically, as a minority owner of Hydro One now, the provincial government can’t fire him. But it did retain the power to fire the utility company’s board when it sold off a majority share, so if the board won’t fire Schmidt, Ford will fire the board and replace its members with people who will. Or maybe he’ll fire the board regardless. To be honest, he left it a little unclear.
“You can take this to the bank. The CEO’s gone and the board’s gone. We need to start respecting the taxpayers,” Ford said, sounding plain enough. “The $6-million man is gone. The party’s over, it’s done. The party’s over with the taxpayers’ money.”
He turned over specifics to Tory energy critic Todd Smith, who talked about giving the Hydro One board an ultimatum and maybe keeping them on if they complied.
Honestly, Hydro One serves a public function and selling it was short-sighted. It freed up a bunch of cash but Hydro One makes money and selling half of it to the private sector meant selling half its profits forever.
Mayo Schmidt in 2012, when he was chief executive of Viterra.
But here’s the thing: Mayo Schmidt is not the problem here. The province hired him to lead Hydro One after the privatization was already underway. He was already rich: his previous big job was leading Viterra, a grain-handling company descended from the iconic Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, out of profound financial decrepitude and into a $6-billion acquisition by commodities multinational Glencore. Canadian Business magazine called him Canada’s best CEO in 2009. In his last year in that gig, before the sellout, Schmidt was paid $5.1 million.
Transforming Hydro One from a ramshackle public utility everyone loves to hate into an effective private corporation is an almost identical sort of job. Schmidt has a proven history of being good at it, and $6 million is what he costs (a big chunk of that was bonus pay, after share prices rose, which is the chief executive’s job).
Public records show him as a donor to no political party or candidate. He’s not even an Ontario guy — he’s from Kansas and spent most of his career in Saskatchewan. They didn’t find him napping on a couch at Liberal HQ.
So how will firing Schmidt lower hydro bills?
“I’m gonna tell you, we’re going to achieve that,” Ford said. “Over the period of the next 55, 56 days (until the June election), we’re going to roll out how we’re gonna start putting money in the taxpayer’s pocket instead of the government’s pocket.”
Translation: it won’t. If what you want is to see a rich guy get punched in the face over the price of hydro, Ford’s fist is clenched for you. You’ll get the same bill next month and corporate Canada will think the Ontario government has lost its mind, but maybe it’ll feel good for a little bit.
We used to radically underpay for electricity and that left us with a mess that higher prices have paid to fix. If we really, really want cheaper electricity, we can go back to starving the system and start the cycle again. We could plan to stop using nuclear power, which is reliable but the stations are expensive to build and maintain. Or we could go to war with power-sector unions, whose members are collectively paid a whole lot more than Mayo Schmidt. No party proposes any of these risky, difficult ideas.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne announces cuts to hydro rates during a press conference in Toronto, Ont. on Thursday March 2, 2017.
Instead, the Liberals have already lowered prices by 25 per cent by just borrowing money to cut them, knowing it’ll mean higher bills later. Wynne appeals to “generational fairness,” spreading out the costs of fixing up our formerly dirtier and much shakier electricity system over more years, but it still comes down to putting more on credit to pay off in the future.
After years of harassing the Liberals for their ineptitude on hydro, Patrick Brown’s “People’s Guarantee” took that one step further. He’d have kept the Liberal plan and moved more hydro-related expenses into the government budget. Hydro bills would be lower, taxes would be higher. Whoop-de-do.
And the New Democrats want to buy back control of Hydro One at massive expense, see if they can talk the feds into taking sales tax off electricity, and then convene a panel to study the problem.
All of these ideas are cosmetic. Fiddling around the edges at best. They’d still be harder than firing Schmidt or the Hydro One board or both, and would do more good.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
