During the winter recess of 2011-2012, I received notice that Tim Hudak selected me to be the PC lead on the Estimates Committee.  Of course, I had no experience on committees, but knew a thing or two about precedent setting procedures that could frustrate the government.  I also had a pair of keen staffers in my Queen’s Park office that were ready to help do the grunt work, and who, it must be said, never get the recognition for their work that their boss gets.  So, a shout out to Ginny Movat and Adam Yahn (and later Cal MacLellan) who were just outstanding on the committee file.  Little did they know that I would be spending a lot of time in committee!  Then there was the Legislative Affairs team, led by Jeffrey Kroeker among other supporting cast members, who didn’t know what kind of tsunami we were about to unleash.

I had the pleasure of serving on the Estimates Committee with Michael Harris and Rick Nicholls who similarly don’t get acknowledged for the hours they logged on the Estimates Committee and who ably tag teamed with me through some grueling sessions in Estimates.  The beauty of this caucus team is that we were all rookies, and that helped us sometimes and hurt us in others, but overall, we weren’t afraid to work.

Beyond this cast, we had a caucus who was energized about energy.  Many of the class of 2011 were brought to office on the basis of our staunch opposition to industrial wind turbines that have been changing our rural landscape.  Hydro bills were enormous.  Rates were increasing.  Green energy jobs were a fantasy.  The public was engaged.

Contrasting those seats where we were successful were the seats we needed to be successful in, but we ultimately weren’t in 2011.  We had a number of targets in the western part of the GTA where we had hoped to win. However, just days before the Oct. 6th election, the Liberals had pulled the plug on the Mississauga gas-fired power plant.  The gambit was successful, and so we began to speak of it as the largest and most expensive seat saver program in Canadian history.  The problem is that we really didn’t know how much it would cost to cancel the pair of projects.  Only one party did – the governing one.

I sat down with my Estimates team, caucus and staff, and developed a plan.  Our plan was to spend almost all of our time on gas plants and a small amount of time on green energy.  Well, it wasn’t too long before caucus realized that we had the Minister of Energy for 15 hours (really only 5 hours were for PC questions) that I started getting requests from everyone to look at the Ring of Fire, wind turbines, home heating challenges, and faux green energy job claims, to list but a few of the bigger ones.

Our game plan was challenged by a caucus who wanted to talk about issues that their constituents were talking about, and they wanted to have the time to put questions to the minister and challenge him so that they could report back to their ridings.  A simmering feud was brewing about giving all issues fair and equal treatment.

Things were very close to not proceeding with gas plant questions in committee.  It almost didn’t start out as planned.  We rarely have moments in our life where we look back and say “what if we chose a different way a couple years ago?”

With Jim Wilson’s intervention, we forged ahead, and as the method to the madness became clearer in terms of what information we were trying to get, caucus got behind the plan.  We spent a good many hours in June and July of 2012 fighting the good fight in committee.   Yet, to our amazement, we couldn’t have predicted that the gas plants issue we first pursued in May of 2012 would have lasted nearly 3 years.

Had the Liberals given us a number for the cost and told us it was going to come out of a contingency fund, it would have ended.  The NDP didn’t want to make contempt a personal affair, and there was a lot of high level negotiation to make them comfortable with our plan.  Had the NDP chose to sit this one out, it again would not have worked out.

After the report was tabled, the entire legislature was seized with the issue of dealing with a new motion I presented in the legislature asking the Justice Committee (the committee was chosen for no other reason than it sounded more legal) to investigate the Speaker’s ruling on the prima facie breach of my Member’s (and by extension all members’) privilege to have access to persons, papers, and things.  Had the federal Liberals not pulled the same stunt in Ottawa, it probably wouldn’t have dawned on us to even go as far as we did.  And, if we’re being fair, had Harper not pulled the prorogation stunt in Ottawa, it may not have dawned on the Liberals to do the same to Queen’s Park.  Much to my amusement, however, the Queen’s Park prorogation went largely unnoticed compared to Ottawa.  Funny how that is…

Once the Justice Committee was struck, the strategizing began.  I preferred a much more prosecutorial style that was punchy and and went for the meat, which, on the face of it, we were dealing with an expensive and politically motivated decision to cancel a gas plant the government had no authority to cancel.  The government had always claimed, until 2010, that the OPA had the sole authority to site and build energy.  By definition, then, they were the only ones that could cancel a power plant project too. The Ontario Power Authority is an arms length body that inoculates the government from unpopular decisions, and the government has set up dozens of them everywhere.  Except, what really happens is that the government has a pesky habit of championing populist enthusiasm for action.  Put it this way, to build an unpopular but necessary power plant, it’s the OPA’s fault.  To cancel an unpopular power plant, it’s all a government decision which they use to grab some votes.  These agencies, boards, and commissions, in other words, mean that the government can do no wrong.  That really bothers me!

Others on the Justice Committee preferred a more evidence-gathering approach.  The idea with this strategy is to find contradiction in the testimony.  It meant that everybody would be called and they would be asked similar questions. Once we got through the list, we would then call back witnesses to account for any discrepancy. This was ultimately the approach we adopted because there was a desire to keep talking gas plants for as long as possible.  And we called witnesses, even though they may have had only marginal knowledge of what we wanted to know.  Beyond the pros and cons of adopting this strategy and keeping media interest for a long time (a challenge given the limited space newspapers are giving to provincial politics), I wasn’t fond of the idea of bringing neutral, mid-level bureaucrats to committee.  They were of little consequence to the political nature of the decision, in my view.  They were only involved insofar as they were carrying out the directions of their political masters.  Plus, it defied my purist belief in political masters being accountable and responsible for the undertakings of their departments anyway.

The remarkable thing about the gas plant saga is that every time I thought the process was dying a slow death, something else happened.  Whether that was more document discoveries or the privacy commissioner’s report or the auditor-general reports or the OPP investigation, we had no idea in 2012 that we’d still be talking about gas plants in 2015. Unlike the other scandals, this one seemed to stick.  At a number of junctures, this process could have ended, but a series of events kept it alive.

What has come out of this process? A few things, actually.  First, you can’t trust what political operatives are telling you.  According to them, the cost of the gas plant cancellations was only $230 million when the end price tag was over $1.1 billion.  That’s not a rounding error.  It means when the government tells you it will balance its budget by 2017-2018, you can’t believe it.  Second, the Ontario Public Service now has developed an established protocol for dealing with the collection of documents and the distribution of information to a legislative committee.  It took awhile, but we’ve arrived at a point where they now have the system in place to share this information.  Third, legislative committees have developed a protocol for accepting commercially sensitive material, and material that should be deemed private.  If taken to the next step, these two protocols can help the government with its Open Government initiatives, if it so chooses (my guess is that the Liberals won’t go far on this at all).  Fourth, speaking of Open Government, the provincial government has never been more open as it was thanks to the handy work of the opposition in the 40th Parliament of Ontario.  Premier Wynne can think she was being open and transparent, but she wouldn’t have been had we not forced her hand.  She didn’t restart the Justice Committee, we used procedure to force it to come back.  Her Government House Leader argued against the procedure.  Let’s stop the revisionist history!

The conclusions of the committee are now easy to see.  But even if the conclusions don’t meet the expectations of the public, especially if the OPP conclude criminal charges should be laid, my hope is that a broader discussion of parliamentary reform can begin.  As you can see with the report, the opposition is completely unable to extract any accountability from a government in the majority.  For the sake of restoring some faith back into parliamentary institutions, we should do our utmost to empower members to do their job.  For too long, the legislature has been besieged with a weak opposition because institutional parameters make it so.  The corresponding effect is that the real opposition for the Ontario government is either Ottawa, the A-G, the Ombudsman or some other officer of the legislature, and not the very people we elect.  That’s terrible for democracy. I’d much rather see the opposition given equal weight on committees – to give them real power – or to perhaps institutionalize a counter weight body like a Senate that can effectively represent regions and perhaps be selected by proportional representation.  It’s the people’s legislature after all, and they need to get their voice back.