Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne will be the first to tell you the province’s economy is doing great.

However, the uneasy feeling from residents is also out there and is something the Premier isn’t ignorant to.

But it’s all part of an economic uncertainty seen across North America as we have obvious strong ties to the United States.  She says through it all, the province still has to work to help itself with new ideas.

Many of the recent ideas centre around youth, so no better place to visit Thursday morning than the Timmins Family YMCA.

With a gaggle of children and youth workers as the backdrop, Wynne met with local media and dignitaries.  While the usual questions on hydro costs and the Ring of Fire popped up, youth was the key to her speech.

And that message was two-fold when you consider both the recent announcement of OHIP+ and the previously introduced plan to offer free tuition to students of low-income families.

First off, the OHIP+ plan has been highlighted heavily throughout her tour stops in the last week and it was no different in Timmins.

It is part of the 2017 provincial budget, providing free prescription medication for anyone 24 years of age and younger with an OHIP plan, regardless of income.  That will start in 2018 and is said will help more than four million children.

“We’re taking this action now because too many people are struggling to pay for medication,” Wynne said, noting workplaces aren’t as secure as they used to be on that subject.

“The reality is that not as many people have benefit programs as they used to.”

Wynne says ideally, they’d have a national pharmacare program that covers everyone, but that’s a discussion for them and the federal government to have.

With that, they had to make a choice and at first, there was thought of making age 18 the cut off.  But the Premier adds they looked at the United Nations’ definition of youth, and they classify it as anyone between 15-24.

Perfect for college and university students, most of whom move away from home and take on the burden of paying housing bills for the first time.

“When young people leave home to go live somewhere else, they lose that (program) support of their family often or they’re not on the benefit program anymore and it takes them those years—from 18-25—to get established,” Wynne says, “So that’s why we went to (age) 24 because that seems to be the time that the stats show us that young people are more in a position to pay for their medication.”

Speaking of college and university students, Wynne also got to speak on their modified Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP).

Just as a refresher, it was announced in January that the new OSAP will make average tuition free for students whose families make less than $50,000 a year.

An estimated 230,000 students receiving OSAP will have less debt to take care of after graduation by next year.

Wynne acknowledges that low-income students are less likely to go and seek advanced education, and so this program helps in that respect.

“We want to make sure every young person across this province has the opportunity to go to college, go to university, take a skilled trade if they want to do that cause we need them at their best.”

So select students not only get free medication, but also free tuition, great.

But how about the cost of living?  More importantly, the cost of hydro.  We’ve had this conversation before, heck, it doesn’t seem to have an end point.

It was recently announced the province will look to cut electricity bills by 17 per cent by June 1st, on top of the eight-per-cent rebate.

In this plan, it will mean lower bills for the next 10 years but higher costs for the 20 years after that.

More specifically, the hydro plan will lower time-of-use rates by removing from bills a portion of the global adjustment, a charge consumers pay for above-market rates to power producers.

For the next 10 years, a new entity overseen by Ontario Power Generation will take on debt to pay that difference.  That means there will be no impact on Ontario’s net debt—currently at about $312 billion—or annual surplus/deficit, said Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk.

However, the auditor told a committee studying the hydro legislation Wednesday that it “sets a dangerous precedent.”

“There are a lot of people investing a lot of time and money to set this up, structured in such a way that it doesn’t affect bottom line,” she said.

Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault has said OPG has expertise in managing hydro-related debt.

The OPG Trust is financing 55 per cent of that borrowing, with the province financing the rest. But the OPG Trust borrows at an average rate of 5.4 per cent, compared to the province’s 4.5 per cent, the Financial Accountability Officer noted.

So if the government took on all of the refinancing, ratepayers could save $4 billion, the FAO concluded.

Now factor these numbers in for a moment.  The recent report from the FAO shows Ontario residents will be paying a net $21 billion dollars over the next 30 years to achieve these short term savings.

The government itself will spend $45 billion over the life of its hydro plan to save people $24 billion on their bills in that time frame.

That $45 billion will mostly cover funding the rebate, but if that rebate is funded through debt, the FAO says the cost could reach as high as $93 billion dollars.

The conversation will continue with Thibeault visiting Timmins Friday afternoon.

But with the numbers taken into account, Rogers Media asked Wynne if the short-term impact is merely some ploy to get the Liberals through the 2018 election.

Wynne responded by bringing up the situation the Liberals walked into when they took over in 2003.

“It look at least 30 years, probably 40 years to let the electricity system degrade to the state that it had in 2003,” she said,

“We were having black outs and brown outs around the province.  There were thousands of kilometres of line that needed to be rebuilt and that work hadn’t been done over those generations.  So electricity costs were low over that period of time, but the work wasn’t being done.”

Wynne adds a lot of work has been done since then, acknowledging work on rebuilding electricity lines and shutting down coal-fired plants.

“The air is cleaner, there’s less pollution in the air, the system is reliable and renewable so there’s a cost associated with that and what was happening was that was work that had to be done and all of those costs were on the shoulders of people today.”

Wynne calls the electricity grid an asset that’ll be used for generations to come and believes it is fair to spread the cost over the 30-year period.

So fair, Wynne says she would have no issue explaining it to future generations like her granddaughter Olivia, who the Premier added only exists because of Timmins. (Wynne’s daughter met her partner in Timmins).

“When she’s 25 or 26 and she’s paying her own electricity bills, I can say you know what, yeah you’re paying a little bit of what we built when grandma was the Premier,” she said.

“I don’t have a problem explaining that to her because it means she’s growing up in a province with clean air, with a strong electricity system so that’s how we made this decision.”

Wynne later met with Timmins Mayor Steve Black before being whisked off to Fort Albany First Nation.

Her itinerary also notes she will visit Moose Factory late Thursday afternoon.

CLICK HERE to see the YouTube stream of her press conference.

 

Filed under: Local News