How the privatization and resulting taxpayer-funded subsidies for a private power company are eating away at families in Northern Ontario, and how we can take back power. Literally.

What is the cost of lies?

In Ontario, it looks like $6 billion a year—subsidies paid out not to help people, but to paper over the failure of privatizing our power. It looks like climbing hydro bills for families in Northern Ontario. It looks like power lines owned by shareholders instead of citizens. For decades, we were told that breaking up Ontario Hydro and selling it off piece by piece would bring competition, efficiency, and lower rates. We were lied to, and Ontario took the Big Lie as truth.

One of the best ways we can improve the quality of life as well as make life in Ontario affordable is to examine the budget behemoth that is Hydro One, and how we as tax-payers are filling in a massive growing canyon at roughly $6 Billion dollars a year to avoid admitting that the privatization of electricity in Ontario was a costly mistake.

The move from Ontario Hydro with it’s public power commissions to the privatization into Hydro One was an act of governmental stupidity fuelled by corporate greed. So far under Doug Ford, Ontario has spent over $49 Billion subsiding a private corporation to reduce energy bills…which begs the question….

…if we’re spending that amount of cash, why not just buy the fucking thing and regulate it to operate as consumer-friendly as possible via a crown corporation. A return back to it’s public-ownership roots would be a massive relief to Ontarians – the reduction of energy costs via socialization of power generation via public power commissions would allow us to better improve and direct the development of our energy grid without requiring the need to generate profits for a corporate board.

Let’s face this fact head on – electricity in this day and age is an essential cost, and as such should be ran critical state infrastructure; especially in the North where families heavily rely on heating their homes to get through harsh, heavy winters. The current system is legitimately killing Ontarians; the amount we’re subsiding this private company with tax dollars is starving long-term care and the healthcare system of well-needed funding. By supporting this free-market neoliberal fiscal policy, we’re legitimately causing indirect suffering and death in Ontario by starving other vital and critical aspect of public services.

We’re robbing Paul to pay Peter, while Paul is bleeding out on the sidewalk at this point.

You may be asking, how did we get here? Why are we even doing this?

In 1998, then-Premier Mike Harris and his Progressive Conservative government passed the Energy Competition Act, dismantling Ontario Hydro into multiple entities and paving the way for privatization. What was once a strong, publicly owned utility was splintered—its parts parcelled off, with Hydro One eventually sold on the stock market.

The goal?

A so-called “open market” for electricity that would bring down costs through competition. The result? A system rife with complexity, runaway executive salaries, and skyrocketing hydro bills—especially punishing for rural and Northern communities. If there is one thing to realize, the free-market is a godsend for stockholders but it is goddamn expensive for consumers.

Rather than reduce costs, privatization has dramatically increased them. To shield the public from the true price of this failure, Ontario now spends nearly $6 billion per year subsidizing electricity rates—projected to total over $228 billion over 25 years (Global News).

These subsidies don’t just benefit ordinary Ontarians. In fact, some of the largest recipients are big corporations like Loblaws and mining giants—while the average community in Northern Ontario, like Timmins, or Sudbury still feels the squeeze every month. The Ford government has continued these payouts, even as hospitals close beds and social programs starve for funding (CUPE Ontario).

So what does public power look like? Well, guess what? While Ontario went down the neoliberal route, frothing at the mouth for all that sweet corporate cash, other provinces rejected the idea. Both Manitoba, and Quebec have publicly-owned power and it pays off to great benefits for consumers. The difference is simple: public utilities work for the people, not for profit. They reinvest in infrastructure and communities, instead of sending dividends to shareholders.

Northern Ontario lives with the cold longest and pays some of the highest hydro costs in the province. It’s time to ask: why are we paying for someone else’s profits when we could be building a public utility that works for all of us?

Public power is not just an economic policy—it’s a matter of economic justice. Of sovereignty. Of building a Northern Ontario where essential services are in the people’s hands, not behind a paywall or profit margin. We are more than an economic colony in a province obsessed with deregulation, and privatization at the expense of the common Ontarian.

The lie of privatization is costly. But it’s not too late to reverse it.
Let’s demand real, public power again.

Power to the North. Power to the People.

-K-