07.08.2015 12:49 PM

Toronto Star editors unsure what is the truth

…so they go for both possibilities. That’s a newsroom that covers all the angles!

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12 Comments

  1. Peter says:

    “Unsure of the truth”? I think you’re pulling your punches again, Warren. Just ask Catherine Porter today. If you can find her…

    • Warren says:

      Yeah, I think Ezra left her looking pretty bad, to tell you the truth.

      • Lou says:

        This is quite comical. It takes stones to make up a fake story, but it takes supersized stones to make up a fake story while you FULLY AWARE that you are being recorded. Can you imagine the outrage by the Star”s usual army of attack dogs (Hepburn, Mallick, Hume (?), if this was a story that appeared in the Post or Globe involving one of their pets (Justin, Olivia)? I hate to say someone should be fired for this, but when pull off a stunt like this…….

  2. Mike says:

    How exactly are we going to get cheaper hydro?

    • Matt says:

      Well, seeing as how we have a surplus we have TO PAY OTHER JURISDICTIONS to take off our hands, we could stop building solar fields and wind turbines we don’t need.

      The Ontario government pays 8 times per kW/h for wind/solar than it does for hydro electric and nuclear. But of course they can’t because they’ve got signed contracts with producers who get paid to NOT produce.

      They could get rid of the stupid smart meters and time of use pricing which by everyone’s account – except the Ontario Liberals – has been an unmitigated disaster.

      • Mike says:

        First off, most of Ontario’s hydro comes from nuclear. And you can’t just flip a switch and turn off a reactor.

        And even if we were somehow able to exactly match generation with demand, so that there was no cost to get rid of surplus electricity. How much would be saved? And how much would that lower rates?

        Price differentiation can be found with many different products, and is a way of capturing the consumer surplus. So that consumers that value a product more, pay more for it. Ever pay more for an airline ticket because you booked it last minute? Ever pay more for gas because it’s a long weekend?

        Price differentiation is just good business and economics. But I love when conservatives, who extol the virtues of the market, get their shorts in a know when Liberals put into practice what conservatives preach.

        • cgh says:

          Not quite correct, Mike. You can turn reactors off very rapidly. Their shutdown systems are designed to work in fractions of a second. The problem is then turning them back on. When just turned off, the fuel will have lots of neutron absorbing xenon in it. Xenon is a fission product with a very short half life, but is a very high neutron absorber. It functions like sand in a gas tank. Typically you have to wait for several days to allow the xenon to decay.

          As to your other comment regarding surplus generation, that’s usually a good thing IF you can produce it when the customer wants it because of shortages in his system. However, wind and solar cannot be produced on demand. Hence they have to be dumped into the market at the instant of generation regardless of what the price may be. Ontario used to generate about half a billion dollars a year in net revenues from selling electricity into the US. Not any more after the coal plant shutdowns.

  3. Mark says:

    Lose one Pulitzer-winning journalist and the whole place goes to shit.

  4. Ron Waller says:

    The Toronto Star has as much journalistic integrity as the Toronto Sun. Both rags believe the role of the fourth estate is to actively campaign for political parties and other political causes (like killing electoral reform.)

    During the 2014 Ontario election, TORSTAR CORP(tm) published over 30 op-ed pieces claiming the Liberal party was the left-wing party and the NDP leader was another right-wing Margaret Thatcher. What happened when the Liberals won a fake majority on 38% of the vote? They privatized the electricity system, even though this was not in their platform.

    Maggie Thatcher must be smiling down on Kathleen Wynne and the Toronto Star from neo-con heaven. Great job AHs!

    (BTW, recent campaign piece from Bob Hepburn: claims Mulcair is opportunistically trying to woo separatist votes by supporting a simple majority separation vote. He knows that Mulcair is simply upholding the NDP’s 10-year-old Sherbooke Declaration that existed before Mulcair became a member of the federal NDP. It’s a dumb policy, of course. But Hepburn is the one being opportunistic here by misrepresenting the facts to politick for the Liberals. Doesn’t get more crass than that!)

  5. Tim White says:

    The Ontario Chamber of Commerce is asking for lower rates for business customers and higher rates for residential customers.
    What does this have to do with the Toronto Star’s reporting?

    • cgh says:

      It takes a fairly perverse reading of the TorStar’s writeup to come to that conclusion. By discontinuing the debt retirement charge for residential customers only, the government is shifting the burden to commercial ones. The Chamber is too polite to say it, but I will. This was blatant vote-buying. this also ignores the reality of how the debt retirement fund has been abused. Ontario Hydro is ancient history; the fund has been used for all sorts of slush-fund activity unrelated to retiring old debt. Otherwise, perhaps you can explain how the inherited stranded debt from the old Ontario Hydro ROSE during McGuinty’s term as premier.

      • Tim White says:

        Fair comment. Did not read the Star on this. I was looking only at the stuff Warren put up. I am from Ontario but have not resided there for some time. I think Ontario Hydro’s troubles stem from when they stopped being you know Ontario Hydro. Nukes have ship wrecked plenty of jurisdictions’ power generating budgets and Ontario is no exception. You can say lots of stuff against Premier Wynne but to my mind this is an inherited long term problem and not easy to fix.

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