Thursday, October 19, 2017

LIBERALS ARE HIDING THE HYDRO DEBT COSTS-AND WE WILL GET THE HIGH SKYROCKETING BILLS IN A COUPLE OF YEARS TO PROOVE IT.AND FORCED TO PAY IT.

JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.GET SAVED NOW- CALL ON JESUS TODAY.THE ONLY SAVIOR OF THE WHOLE EARTH - NO OTHER. 1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)

Reevely: Hiding billions in hydro debt 'unacceptable,' Ontario's auditor general says-David Reevely David Reevely-| Last Updated: October 17, 2017 3:53 PM EDT

Hiding billions of dollars the Ontario government is borrowing to lower electricity bills for a few years will cost hydro users an extra $4 billion, the province’s auditor general reported Tuesday morning.Maybe worse, Bonnie Lysyk said in a special report on the Liberals’ “Fair Hydro Plan,” the tricks the government is using throw doubt on all the province’s books. The government, citizens, auditors and giant institutions that lend the province money are pretty much operating in a post-truth universe, where what the Liberals say is going on with Ontario’s finances has begun to drift from any previously understood shared reality.What the Liberals have done “would be unacceptable in the private sector, and we maintain that this is also unacceptable in the public sector,” Lysyk reported. “If the consolidated financial statements are so unreliable that an adverse opinion is warranted, terms like ‘balanced budget,’ ‘deficit,’ ‘asset’ and ‘net debt’ will be meaningless.”Here’s what’s happening.Earlier this year, Premier Kathleen Wynne gave up defending the increases in the price of electricity since the Liberals took over in 2003. She and her cabinet put together a plan to cut bills that amounted to paying today’s costs with borrowed money and repaying it with interest later. It has already cut residential bills by an average of 25 per cent, beginning last summer. And it will increase them by a combined total of $21 billion over time, when all that interest has to be paid, according to a previous report by Ontario’s financial accountability officer (whose job is specifically to run budget numbers independently of the government, and whose findings Lysyk used for her dollar figures).The argument they make is that the investment in cleaner and more reliable power will benefit us for a long time, so we should pay for it over more years — that’s “fairer.” This is debatable but not obviously ludicrous. That additional “fairness” is costing $17 billion in interest, spread out over years.The Liberals really, really, really wanted to keep that debt off their books, so they could also go into the next election saying the provincial budget is balanced. Borrowing billions in an election year would get in the way. So they did some advanced financial engineering to put the debt on Ontario Power Generation instead. The Crown corporation is publicly owned but it doesn’t get interest rates as good as the provincial government itself, so that’s where the $4-billion premium comes in.Her team looked at emails from the upper reaches of several government ministries, though the Ministry of Energy kept some back, Lysyk’s report says.“Hopefully they’ll come to the conclusion that it can be financed by the province … rather than externally, as that would be a lot simpler and cheaper,” she quotes one unnamed senior official, in an email.Nope. OPG is borrowing the money on our behalf and then there’s a complicated interplay of regulatory and financial manoeuvres to book money we’re expecting hydro users to pay for electricity in the 2020s, ’30s and ’40s as assets that balance off the debt. The essence of the scheme is to say Ontarians are borrowing these billions of dollars as hydro ratepayers, not as voting citizens. Same people, different hats, different rules.All of which is bull, Lysyk says. The point of accounting is to tell you how much money you have, how much you owe and how much you are owed. That’s what the standards for Canadian public-sector accounting are supposed to achieve.“These standards are there to ensure that the financial reporting of government policy decisions reflects common sense: borrowings are debt, unearned revenue is not an asset today and when your expenses exceed your revenues, you incur a deficit,” Lysysk said Tuesday. Nobody has used electricity in 2025 yet, let alone 2040. You can’t count guesstimates of use and prices 20 years down the line as an asset today.The usefulness of doing so was visible when Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault and Treasury Board President Liz Sandals responded to Lysyk’s report. They think the $4-billion estimate for the extra cost of hiding the debt is too high. They argue the gap between the government’s interest rate and Ontario Power Generation’s might not be as big as the financial accountability office thinks.They could be right — we won’t know for sure till the 2040s. So it’s a bit weird to account for it as if it’s a fait accompli.The government even went shopping for different accounting standards it might use, Lysyk’s report says, trying out rules used for private businesses in the United States because they seemed friendlier to what the Liberals wanted to do. Consulting firm Deloitte told the government this was OK, a position it repeated at the government’s request on Tuesday after Lysyk released her report.Maybe reasonable accountants can disagree about this. But the ground they’re fighting over is whether the trick the Liberals used to keep the debt off the government books at a cost of billions of dollars is an acceptable trick, not whether they’re keeping the debt off the government books or whether it’s going to cost billions of dollars.Which is just what you want from your government, right? dreevely@postmedia.com-Twitter.com/davidreevely.

Auditor general blasts Kathleen Wynne's 'Fair Hydro Plan'-Liberals 'improperly' keeping hydro plan debt off government's books, says special report by Bonnie Lysyk-By Mike Crawley, CBC News Last Updated: Oct 17, 2017 2:16 PM ET

Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk released a special report Tuesday on the Wynne government's move to cut hydro bills by 25 per cent, with an election around the corner.Revealed: Document shows average monthly Ontario hydro bill will top $200 in 10 years.The Wynne government created a "needlessly complex" scheme to pay for its hydro rate cuts without showing the costs on its own bottom line, Ontario's auditor general said in a critical report released Tuesday.Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk investigated the financing of what the Ontario Liberals call the "Fair Hydro Plan." The plan has reduced the average household electricity bill in the province by 25 per cent from the peak in the summer of 2016.Lysyk said the government is "improperly" accounting for the $26 billion in debt the province is taking on to cut hydro bills in the short term.The $26 billion is being borrowed through Ontario Power Generation, so will not appear on the province's books. Electricity customers will pay off that debt through rate increases spread out over the next 30 years.Ontario auditor examines Liberal plan to cut hydro bills-The government chose that financing scheme "to keep deficits and an increase in net debt from showing up on the Province's books," Lysyk said in the report, tabled Tuesday morning in the Legislature.Anywhere else in Canada, you won't see this done.- Bonnie Lysyk, auditor general of Ontario-"The government created a needlessly complex accounting / financing structure for the electricity rate reduction in order to avoid showing a deficit or an increase in net debt," writes Lysyk .The auditor says the plan could also result in Ontarians paying "up to $4 billion more than necessary" in interest. That's because OPG will be required to pay higher interest rates than the province would if the government took on the debt directly.Hydro rate cut audit-Lysyk told a news conference that the government is "wrong" in how it's accounting for the borrowing."Anywhere else in Canada, you won't see this done," she said. "The government's proposal is to treat that loss as an asset."That's like you treating your credit card debt as an asset in your books. Does that sound right to you?"Rate cut won't last: Lysyk-The hydro rate cuts will not last, Lysyk found.  "From 2028 on, ratepayers will be charged more than the actual cost of the electricity being produced in order to pay back the borrowings," she said in the report."The improper accounting also inappropriately transfers long-term accountability for significantly higher electricity bills to future governments," writes Lysyk. "Future governments will have to explain to ratepayers why electricity rates charged in 2028 and beyond exceed the actual cost of electricity."How your hydro bill will rise over the next decade-The Wynne government is already trying to dismiss all of the auditor's findings."The government of Ontario does not agree with the assertions and conclusions expressed in the report," said an official response issued together with the auditor's report.Todd Smith-The Liberals are portraying the controversy as an "accounting dispute" with the auditor and describing their method of financing the debt as the normal course of business."There were no fast ones being pulled at all," said Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault at a news conference Tuesday. "We always said it's going to take longer to pay off and it's going to cost more." "We're not inventing something new," said Treasury Board president Liz Sandals.The opposition parties are seizing on the auditor's report. PC critic calls move 'deceitful, dishonest'-The Fair Hydro Plan "was simply a ploy to hide the actual cost of this borrowing scheme ... and at the same time, tell people in Ontario that they had balanced the budget," PC energy critic Todd Smith told reporters at Queen's Park."It is deceitful, it's dishonest and it's shady," said Smith."We've got an Enron-style accounting system that's being set up by the Liberals to hide the debt they're taking on so that the books will look good in the next election," said NDP energy critic Peter Tabuns.Ontario's financial accountability officer has already described the scheme as a "complicated accounting structure" that will increase gross debt by approximately $26 billion by 2027-28, but not show any impact on the government's books. 

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