Out of nowhere, the Ottawa Citizen prints a front page apology to former Premier Dalton McGuinty.  Like everybody else, I was struck by it, particularly when it comes some 3 months after the articles in question were published.  I was one of the two Tory MPPs who asked the OPP to launch an investigation.  No, the OPP were not investigating the gas plant cancellation.  We asked them to investigate the deletion of e-mails that was discovered during the course of the legislature’s probe of the gas plant scandal.  This wasn’t an investigation on McGuinty personally.  It was an investigation on the record keeping practices of his office.  I can understand making sure that the record on this stand corrected.

But, and there’s always a but, reading the apology again makes it seem something far more is at play.  If you’ve followed the gas plant saga much, you’ll know that the Liberals’ primary defence is to say something along the lines of ‘don’t blame us, anyone who won the 2011 election would have cancelled the plants too.’  What was included in this apology?  Why it’s that argument!

Let’s be clear: the gas plant scandal, if we’re still calling it that, has nothing to do with the opposition parties.  Accepting the government’s spin on the opposition’s hypothetical prospect of cancelling the project, should they have won over the Liberals, is a cop-out.  The automatic response to that hypothetical situation is that neither the Tories nor the NDP would have put the plant in a community that didn’t want it.  Again, a hypothetical statement.  That’s why we focus on the facts –  i.e. what actually happened – rather than reduce ourselves to ‘what if’ scenarios.

The facts show that the Liberal government accepted the location of the gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga. They promised on the eve of an election to get rid of them.  They did that, and it was a mess.  Subsequently, they couldn’t tell Ontarians how much it cost.  Then they misled Ontarians by understating the total cost by about a billion dollars.  Not only did they mislead Ontarians about the cost, they also deleted emails that could have gleaned more information about the gas plant cancellations.  None of this falls on the opposition parties at all.

I’m saying all of this because it is completely irrelevant to say the opposition would have done the same by cancelling them.  It’s just not true.  Two auditor reports show that the Liberals actively made decisions that made the cancellations more expensive.  So why is this ‘the opposition would have done the same’ line in the apology?  Why is the Citizen adopting the Liberal spin in an unprecedented apology?

Imagine if you were the journalist who wrote the stories in question, which relied upon inside police sources.  Your editor agreed with your story and published it.  Then, some months afterward, you’re now told that the article was off.  Imagine if the Fords threatened suit on the journalists that were pursuing the mayor of Toronto.  If those publishers caved under pressure, that would have been the end to that investigative series.  But in that case, the newspaper stood resolutely behind its journalists and their stories.  It’s kind of what newspapers due.  So what gives?