Sunday, April 15, 2012

Environment Minister Jim Bradley and the "Mystery of Ontario's 50,000 Fake Liberal Green Jobs"!

Further to my earlier posts here, and here ...

Lorrie Goldstein wrote about McGuinty's Liberal GreenScam job fakery in the Apr.14, 2012 Toronto Sun:

"I have a business proposition for anyone who still believes Premier Dalton McGuinty will create 50,000 green energy jobs by the end of this year, as he promised in 2009 when he introduced his Green Energy Act.
My proposition is I have some ocean front property in Alberta I’d like to sell you.
In the real world, not even McGuinty’s own government is pretending this promise is based in reality anymore.
Last week, on April 12, Ontario’s energy ministry announced a new “Clean Energy Economic Development Strategy,” including a new government task force and trade missions to Asia, the Middle East and U.S.
The ministry said this will “create even more jobs in the clean energy sector,” while boasting “ Ontario’s green energy strategy has created over 20,000 jobs and is on track to create 50,000 jobs.” Notice there’s no longer any time frame given on when those 50,000 jobs will be created.
But there was a year ago, on May 16, 2011, when the government issued a release headlined “McGuinty Government Creating Clean Enegy Jobs” which began by claiming, “Ontario’s Green Energy Act will help the province create 50,000 new clean energy jobs by the end of 2012.” But wait a minute. The Green Energy Act was passed in May, 2009. It’s now April, 2012, less than 9 months from the end of 2012.
Doesn’t add up
So, how’s McGuinty going to create “50,000 new clean energy jobs by the end of 2012” as his release of a year ago claimed, given that as of last week, according to his government’s own numbers, it had only created 20,000 jobs since 2009?
This brings us to the issue of how McGuinty came up with the 50,000 figure.
Ontario Auditor General Jim McCarter reported last December in his review of McGuinty’s renewable energy policies that “no independent, objective, expert investigation had been done to examine the potential effects of renewable energy policies on prices, job creation, and greenhouse gas emissions.” As a result, “billions of dollars were committed to renewable energy without fully evaluating the impact, the trade-offs, and the alternatives through a comprehensive business-case analysis.” This leads to the question of what type of jobs McGuinty was talking about in 2009 when he made the claim 50,000 would be created by the end of 2012.
McCarter concluded: “A majority of the jobs will be temporary. The (energy) ministry projected that of the 50,000 jobs, about 40,000 would be related to renewable energy. Our review of this projection suggests 30,000, or 75% of these jobs, would be construction jobs and would last only from one to three years … the high proportion of short-term jobs was not apparent from the ministry’s announcement.” (And, we might add, still isn’t.)
Finally, when McGuinty claimed in 2009 that 50,000 jobs would be created, did he mean net new jobs? In other words, would his green energy program actually create 50,000 more jobs for Ontarians than existed in 2009?
McCarter found the government’s 50,000 estimate did not factor in “jobs that would be lost as a result of promoting renewable energy” and “experience in other jurisdictions suggests that jobs created in the renewable energy sector are often offset by jobs lost as a result of the impact of higher renewable energy electricity prices on business, industry and consumers.” McCarter noted that since Ontario modelled its Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) program on renewable energy pricing on FIT programs in Spain and Germany, their experiences could well be relevant to Ontario .
He cited a 2009 Spanish study which found “for each job created through renewable energy programs, about two jobs were lost in other sectors of the economy” and a 2009 German study which found, “the cost of creating renewable-energy- related jobs was up to US$240,000 per job per year, far exceeding average wages in other sectors.”
Now, about that ocean-front property in Alberta … "
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50,000 Liberal fake greenie jobs = 50,000 GreenFear Liberal lies told by Dalton McGuinty and Jim Bradley.

Rest assured, folks, that no-one from the St.Catharines Wrong-Righter will bother asking their buddy Ole Jimmy to explain his Liberal green deceptions - after all, Jim Bradley is only Ontario's environment minister! What can a red-faced Ole Jimmy possibly know about his own Liberal government's green lies?!
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