Canceled gas plants in Ontario are causing headaches for Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Ontario's Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk has released her final report on the cancelled gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga and it's another crushing blow to the Ontario Liberal Party's credibility. When the Liberal Party announced that the plans for Oakville would be scrapped, they quoted a cost of around $40 million. The final report of the Auditor General put that cost at $675 million. The combined cost of both cancellations: an estimated $1.1 billion.

The crucial point in this entire debacle was solidified back in February when Premier Kathleen Wynne publicly admitted that the gas plants were cancelled in a deliberate attempt to woo voters in the Oakville and Mississauga regions where they were to be built. Her admission is shocking only in that it shows the pervasive attitude within government that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission and the worst part is that they're right. There was a poll taken in September that showed Wynne's popularity as virtually unchanged when compared with a similar poll taken before the cancellation scandal hit. The same poll showed that more people thought the government was doing a good job with their energy portfolio after the cancellations than before.

Wynne has made the optics of the issue even worse by her promise to de-politicize the process of locating large energy generation projects. While taking full responsibility for the disaster and promising it won't happen again, she's ensuring that there's no opportunity to foul up the process in the future as opposed to just behaving ethically. Her strategy is the same one used by drug addicts who go into rehab: I can't mess up again if I can't be near it. Instead of instituting some form of oversight or accountability, she's simply taking the opportunity for any political involvement in the process, negative or positive, off the table.

Unfortunately for the province, the Ontario Liberals have proved they're willing to make the wrong decisions if they're the popular ones. The voters essentially have to decide for themselves whether the Ontario Liberal Party is stupid and dishonest or just dishonest. The latter qualification is self-evident since they allowed concerns over their poll numbers to affect financial decision making but it has yet to be determined whether they knew their own $40 million estimate was flawed when they made the decision.

The issue of credibility is arguably the most influential contributor to a party's chance of success in an election and for some reason people don't seem to think that Wynne's has been compromised. Politicians are expected to claim their party will do a lot of things, but it's whether people believe them that counts. Voters are unlikely to examine the fiscal aftermath of every campaign promise and they assume that, while some platforms have a heftier price tag, all platforms could be implemented for a manageable fee. The Ontario Liberals promised to cancel the gas plants but failed to include the disclaimer: at any cost.
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