Jocelyn Bamford is a Toronto-area manufacturing executive and founder of the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada.
Many thousands of Canadian workers have felt the devastating effects of lost manufacturing jobs during the pandemic.
The shortage of medical equipment and supplies, gloves, gowns, masks and ventilators put Canadians in general, and front-line medical workers in particular, at risk.
Canadians realize that having our manufacturing pushed offshore is having devastating consequences. We are working to bring Canadian manufacturing jobs home.
But what led manufacturers, especially small and medium manufacturers to pull up stakes in the first place? The 2008/2009 Green Energy Act in Ontario, devised by former Premier Dalton McGuinty with help from former Trudeau right-hand man Gerald Butts, was phased in under former Premier Kathleen Wynne. The provincial Liberal government gave lucrative contracts to well-connected companies to provide wind and solar energy.
In many cases, these contracts burden taxpayers for 10 to 20 years.
Depending on the contract, beneficiaries got nine times the going rate for electricity. In fact, current Chair of the Independent Electricity System Operator, former federal minister Joe Oliver, has rightly pointed out in a recent op-ed for Postmedia that: “In 2019, wind and solar represented about 10% of the electricity fed into Ontario’s transmission system but accounted for a quarter of the cost of generation, contributing to a near doubling of prices in the past decade.”
This led many manufacturing companies to leave in search of affordable energy in order to survive.
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