Never mind the racing yacht. Hydro One has finally shown its ability to tap the public pulse.
The beleaguered electricity utility is the prime sponsor of an exhibition to open tomorrow at the Royal Ontario Museum, just up the street from the Ontario Legislature, where for the past couple of weeks it's been all Hydro One, all the time.
The title of the Vatican religious-art display is Images of Salvation, which must pretty well sum up what many Ontario residents are thinking these days: "Lord save us all from the ceaseless barrage of news about Hydro One."
It was only a few weeks ago -- it seems like years -- that New Democrat Leader Howard Hampton was travelling around Ontario on his "power bus" trying to arouse the populace to the dangers of the government's energy policy.
It was tough sledding. The crowds were small and mostly ignorant of the complexities of privatization and deregulation. They wanted only to know -- quite reasonably -- whether the Tory government's radical alternation of the ways in which electricity is generated and delivered meant their prices were going to go up.
We can think of those days of Mr. Hampton's semi-isolation as the golden era before Energy Minister Chris Stockwell and Hydro One president Eleanor Clitheroe barged into our lives and took away our innocence.
Now everyone knows the details of the pay package Ms. Clitheroe has been lugging home from Hydro One and about how her passion for yacht racing led her to throw $360,000 at a ocean-racing yacht. People with time on their hands now sign on to a Web site to track the price of electricity. There are even reports of a few lost souls far away from Bay Street who claim to understand what the government means when it says it might convert Hydro One into an income trust.
The Hydro One issue dominates Question Period every day. Attacks posing as questions are parried by non-answers masked as answers. Reporters raised on Watergate devote their waking hours to trying to find out who knew what and when. Everyone is out for clarity, but it keeps receding further and further into the distance.
Erik Peters walked into this drama yesterday. As the Provincial Auditor, Mr. Peters had been asked to review the deal under which a private company leased from the government the Bruce nuclear generating station on Lake Huron.
The transaction was prompted by the same government policies that brought Hydro One into being three years ago. Even better, Premier Ernie Eves has boasted that he negotiated the lease, and so there was anticipation that he would get his comeuppance.
Mr. Peters, in his meticulous way, refused to play along. Was it a bad deal? Well, he hemmed about the possibility of rising electricity prices and he hawwed about whether the nuclear reactors might fail and then he concluded: "Only time will tell."
The same might be said of the enticing prospect that the government is about to call upon Bob Rae to help clear up the controversy over Ms. Clitheroe's paycheque.
The word is out at Queen's Park that the former NDP premier will take over one of the chairs at the Hydro One board table that were so hastily vacated this week. Mr. Stockwell won't confirm it and Mr. Rae isn't returning telephone calls, but no one in government is jumping up and down to deny it.
If it happens, this would be irony with a capital I. For a decade, Mr. Rae has been reviled by Conservatives as a socialist free-spending tyrant who loaded up Ontario's debt. Indeed, Mr. Stockwell noted yesterday that while overseeing the old Ontario Hydro, Mr. Rae "ran up huge debt and let the rates increase."
What the Energy Minister didn't note, however, is that Mr. Rae knows a trick or two about cutting salaries. Marc Eliesen, installed as Ontario Hydro chairman during the NDP's first year in office in 1991, bowed to a public outcry over his $400,000 salary and accepted a cut to $260,000. Even better, his successor, Maurice Strong, requested that his stipend be cut from $425,000 to the nominal sum of $1 annually.
A buck a year. Now, that would be an image of salvation. mcampbell@globeandmail.ca