Hudak wants to pull Power Authority’s plug

PC leader Tim Hudak was back in the Niagara peninsula today, promising to decrease hydro rates and increase the number of jobs by eliminating the Ontario Power Authority.

Hudak’s first stop was Can-Eng in Niagara Falls, a company that builds industrial heat treating furnaces. Can-Eng says skyrocketing hydro rates are killing some of their clients.

“Unfortunately we have a lot of customers losing plants in Ontario due to high power costs,” says Alan Van Geyn, chairman of Can-Eng.

Hudak vowed to eliminate the Ontario Power Authority, accusing it of driving up hydro costs and chasing jobs away.

“Not only is it a useless expensive bureaucracy, but they actually spend the entire day at Ontario Power Authority figuring out how to make your hydro bill more expensive.”

A group of Niagara business owners want the province to go a step further by offering industries 50 kilometres from the Adam Beck generating station a discount
on their hydro rates. They used to do that decades ago. The justification for it was that some electricity is lost in the transmission lines the further it has to travel.

Thousands of jobs in Niagara region have gone south. Some places here now look like the American rust belt. High unemployment and hydro rates are important issues to
Niagara voters.

Hudak insists his plan to eliminate 100,000 public sector positions will create a million jobs over eight years.

He faced a barrage of media questions, and some economists are accusing Hudak of using bad math.

“There are Liberal politicians. There are others who will say tax cuts don’t create jobs. I’ll stand behind the mountain of evidence that say lower taxes means more
people working,” said Hudak.