Premier Kathleen Wynne on oil prices, smart meters and why the Liberals forced end to gas plant hearings

At the end of a tumultuous year in provincial politics, which began with Premier Kathleen Wynne trying to salvage her government and ended with her in control of a Liberal majority government, the Ottawa Citizen’s David Reevely talked to her about some of the most controversial decisions she’s made and the most difficult challenges she’s taken on. In November, Finance Minister Charles Sousa’s fiscal update showed that just since July, he’d had to revise forecasts of government revenues down by $500 million but had only found $200 million in spending cuts, chewing up a third of the $1-billion contingency fund built into the province’s budget this year. It makes the Liberals’ repeated promise to eliminate a $12.5-billion deficit by 2017 look increasingly difficult to achieve.

Q I’ve been struck every time there’s been a budget or a fiscal update that things don’t seem to be going quite as well as they were supposed to be. Why should we trust your government’s predictions on the state of the province’s finances over the next year or two?

A We’ve worked very hard to put the most small-c conservative projections in place. We work with economists, we get outside validation — which we did in the budget — of our revenue numbers. I think that’s what people can expect, that we will do our utmost to get the best projections possible, and then if things happen that we don’t have any control over, then it’s just that, we don’t have control over them.

Last year, when we were blindsided by the federal government and the over-$600-million hit, we couldn’t have predicted that. This year, it looks like we’ve some progress and we’re up on that revenue expectation in terms of the federal government. So we’ll continue to try to get the best projections possible.

Q But in spite of all the effort to get the projections right, we’ve had a couple of updates in a row where the revenues have been down, spending has been down to try to compensate but you seem to be having trouble keeping that gap as tight as possible.

A This is the financial world, right? Did everybody get it right in terms of oil prices? No, I don’t think so. I mean, the fact is there are projections on the economy, some of which are borne out and others are not. The things that we have control over, in terms of meeting our targets and meeting the commitments that we have made, those are the commitments that people can look to us to meet. But in terms of the externalities, we don’t have control over all those things. So as you say, as we’ve dealt with the revenue issues, we’ve found the offsetting spending solutions. We’re going to continue to do everything in our power and we will hit those targets.

The price of oil has fallen from about $110 a barrel last summer to under $60 a barrel now, mainly thanks to a supply glut. That’s hard on Alberta’s oilpatch but it’s lowered fuel costs and driven down the value of the Canadian dollar.

Q You mentioned oil prices. What do you think low oil prices are going to mean for Ontario in the next year?

A Lower oil prices and a related lower dollar, that does help manufacturing. I’m not going to pretend there isn’t some benefit there. In terms of businesses that are connected to the oilsands — and Ontario’s economy is connected to Alberta’s — it’s a problem for all of us. I’ve been very clear since I’ve been in this job that I see the connectedness among the provinces and across the country. I don’t wish ill on Alberta’s economy.

Q Do you think it’ll be a net positive or a net negative for Ontario?

A You know what, I’m not an economist. I’m not going to be able to answer that question. We’ll let the economists make those predictions.

Restraining public-sector wages is crucial if the Liberals are to meet their deficit targets. The government got AMAPCEO, a union representing management and professional employees in the Ontario public service, to agree to a four-year deal in August that freezes their pay for two years and gives them 1.4 per cent increases for two years after that. But now it’s bargaining with the 76,000-strong Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, both of which took membership votes in which 90 per cent of the members authorized their leaders to call strikes if they believe they’re necessary.

Q You’re in bargaining with some of the biggest unions that you deal with.

A Yup.

Q You got a pretty good, pretty quick deal with AMAPCEO, but ETFO and OPSEU have taken strike votes. I know that’s part of the dance, but what are you going to do to convince their bargainers that a couple of years of zeros are in the best interest not only of Ontario, but of their members?

A That’s going to happen at the table. As we’ve said, we don’t have any new money for salaries and benefits, and any time there’s going to be an increase, there has to be a balancing offset within the funding amount, within the funding envelope. But that discussion will happen at the bargaining table.

As you said, the fact of the strike vote really isn’t anything that people need to worry about. It is part of what unions and federations do to organize their membership. That has nothing to do with whether we’ll get to a collective agreement or not.

A Liberal majority on the legislature’s justice-policy committee forced an end to hearings on how former premier Dalton McGuinty and his staff dealt with the cancellations of two gas-powered generating stations before the 2011 election. They chose not to hear from McGuinty’s former aide, Laura Miller, and her partner, Peter Faist, who was named by the OPP as having tried to erase documents that might have explained the decision.

Q The justice-policy committee has been working on its report on the deletion of emails under your predecessor. I wanted to ask you how that process is served by cutting off the witness list, and specifically by not hearing from Peter Faist and Laura Miller on subjects the committee didn’t know to ask about when they had a chance.

A I think that it is the case that there are, there are members on the committee that would have liked to see it go on forever. We made a decision before the election and in the election campaign that thousands, hundreds of thousands of documents and the hours that had been spent — I think 70 witnesses or something — that that was enough information, that issues were being revisited and it was time for the report to be written.

In fact, there had been opposition members of the committee that said it was time to get on with writing the report. This is not precluding testimony, this is about writing a report on the hundreds of hours of testimony that had already been heard.

Q Sure, but having a couple more days of hearings to hear from some pretty key people would not have been a big problem for the committee. Is there something I’m not getting about something that would open up in terms of extending the hearings?

A Again, we had made the decision it was time to write the report. That opinion has already been expressed on the committee. It’s what I ran on. I was asked over and over again, I was very clear, people heard me say it. So that’s what we’re doing.

Auditor general Bonnie Lysyk’s annual report found the province has spent nearly $2 billion on smart electricity meters but reaped negligible benefits from them, partly because there isn’t a big enough premium on electricity at peak times.

Q The auditor-general’s report produced a lot of crummy headlines, particularly about smart meters. That’s been a sore spot in provincial policy for practically a decade. Do you have an idea of how you can sell the smart meters to people who don’t see that they’re working and now have this auditor general’s report to wave around to support that point?

A I think the most important point about the smart meters is they do make it possible for people to conserve. And they make it possible for people to know more about their usage because of time-of-use pricing. The fact is that our long-term energy plan is very much a conservation-first energy plan, and if we are going to have the kind of conservation we want over the next decade to 20 years, we need to have the data in order to be able to do that.

I know that there are divided opinions on the smart meters. I also know there is a strong school of thought and experience that is supportive of the work that’s been done on the smart meters, sees them as a shrewd investment, is what I think the environmental commissioner has called them, and they have demonstrated that there is the possibility of success. Three per cent of Toronto’s peak load is off peak because of the existence of smart meters. So I’m confident that as people get more used to them, as they become more the norm and people get more information, that people will see the utility of them.

I think one of the issues that has clouded this is the notion that somehow having smart meters was going to, in an absolute way, reduce energy costs across the board. What smart meters have done is they’ve allowed the cost of energy, the increases, to be mitigated. And so yes, the cost of energy has gone up. We are closer to paying the real cost of energy than we have been in the past. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Do we need to make sure energy is affordable and we have programs in place that allow people to conserve and to have cheaper energy at certain times of day, and supports for people who are living in poor circumstances? Absolutely. And we’ve got all those in place.

Q One of the things Bonnie Lysyk pointed out is that while smart meters make a lot of things possible, including making people pay something closer to the real price of the energy they use, they haven’t been used that way to the extent that they could have or should have been.

A That’s a matter of degree, if I may say. With the smart meters, that is possible, and we need more of it to happen. I’m the first to say we need to use them better, we need people to understand the data better, we need people to understand time-of-use pricing better, and to find ways to take advantage of it.

I used the example in the legislature about the ice storm and the data we had because of the smart meters. I don’t know if you heard (Toronto Hydro president) Anthony Haines talk about using the smart meters to identify people who might be at risk, vulnerable people who might need support, by being able to access their smart meters. That kind of usage is only going to increase and it’s only possible because smart meters exist.

This month, Wynne publicly said multiple ministries, including justice, education, labour and health, will be re-examining how they and their staff deal with sexual assault and harassment issues, from criminal complaints to unhealthy cultures on university campuses. They’re to start producing formal plans for changes by March.

I am very, very sure that there are thousands and thousands of women who have stories that they haven’t been able to tell anyone and we need to do everything we can to help them to deal with those

Q I was struck by how comprehensive your plans are when it comes to addressing sexual harassment and sexual assault, all the ministers who’ve been brought in to do work on this. You’ve been a woman in public life for an extended period. Do you have personal experience of this that informs your thinking on it?

A Oh, my position on this is that there are very few women in the world who don’t have experience of discrimination. In terms of my personal experience of sexual assault or sexual violence, I don’t have those experiences. But I believe that this is a continuum. So have I as a woman been very clear that there’s a power dynamic in which I have less power, between me and men? Absolutely. And it’s a thing that I’ve been conscious of my whole life. I can remember as a teenager railing against these realities. I am very, very sure that there are thousands and thousands of women who have stories that they haven’t been able to tell anyone and we need to do everything we can to help them to deal with those.

Q One more. What issues do you think are going to dominate the business of the legislature in the coming year?

A I hope that we’ll be focused on doing everything we can to facilitate the creation of jobs. I’m always reluctant or hesitant to say we’re going to create jobs — I know the private-sector creates jobs, and so I want us to be really focused on what we can do to help people to find work, to help businesses to create more opportunity.

Some of the programs we’re going to be bringing in, Experience Ontario, really builds on the success that we’ve had with the youth employment fund, and it’s going to allow young people, after school, to have a year where they will have an opportunity to be in a job placement and get an idea of what they might want to do when they go into post-secondary. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to focus on those kinds of issues.

I have no doubt that there will be questions about the accountability of government. There always are. But my hope is that the context in which we’ll be working is ‘How do we get the economy cooking?’

This interview has been edited for clarity.