Most people don't pay much attention to electricity except when the lights go out or when they get their bill. They soon will.

There is no safer public investment than your local hydro utility. It is the most valuable asset for virtually every municipality in Ontario. Provincial and municipal hydro utilities have provided a steady stream of revenue to governments to pay for other public services now and in the future. Now Dalton McGuinty and Rocco Rossi want to sell these utilities. It would be extremely short-sighted to sell them. Selling hydro is just a quick fix to get elected and long-term pain that many other jurisdictions found out the hard way.

Governments are looking to privatize a wide variety of public services from water, garbage collection, and roads to education and healthcare. Private pensions are taking a huge hit because of under-funding and the pension raiding by employers that went on in the '80s and '90s. Now public pensions and benefits are threatened with privatization. What will the new private owners do to public workers when they get hold of public assets? They will claim that they have to get wages and benefits in line with the private sector and we will all be much poorer. Maximizing profits will mean less service and a much smaller and lower paid workforce. Good pensions for everyone, public and private, will disappear.

Most people don't know that Enron sat on the market design committee for electricity and that the wholesale market is still open. It is hidden by the fact that the Ontario Energy Board "trues" it up, twice a year. Nor do most people know that the time-of-use or smart meters are just a cover for a massive rate hike that creates enormous room for private profits. The people were promised that smart meters would save them money. People on pensions and fixed income are going to be very hard hit by smart meters and McGuinty's private power pricing.

• Claim: It doesn't matter who owns hydro because it's heavily regulated. Claiming that it's regulated while the government continues to deregulate is duplicitous. Private companies have enormous political power to get regulations changed in their favour. According to The Utility Reform Network in the U.S., private companies spend millions of dollars a year hiring armies of lobbyists to undermine consumer protection laws.
• Claim: Introducing com-petition and free markets into hydro will lead to lower rates. Let's look at the record of privatization and unregulated free markets. When Ernie Eves opened the electricity market in Ontario in 2002, he had to close it in a record six months because of public outrage over skyrocketing rates. Deregulation caused the 2003 blackout in Ontario and the U.S. When the electricity market in Alberta was opened, prices tripled. When the electricity market in Montana was opened, prices went up five times. In California, prices went up ten times when the markets were opened and resulted in blackouts because of Enron market manipulation. In Auckland, New Zealand, prices skyrocketed and they had a record 94 day blackout. In Great Britain where proponents of privatization still maintain that "free market" deregulation was a success, the British government had to bail out British Energy to the tune of five billion pounds. Most recently on January 28, 2010, the news service, IPS, reported that after the wave of deprivatization of water services facilities that started across the world two years ago, municipalities in Europe are now buying back the electricity utilities they sold to private investors in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In Germany, numerous city and regional governments have already ended the privatization of the electricity facilities. The local government in Ottobrunn, Germany, says: "the selling of the municipal utilities to private companies, which only obey the shareowners' interest, has proven to be a mistake".

RATES FOR PUBLICLY-OWNED VS. PRIVATELY-OWNED ELECTRICAL UTILIES IN NORTH AMERICAN CITIES

Public power:
TORONTO 11.46 cents per kwh

Private power:
DETROIT 15.38 cents per kwh
NEW YORK 25.32 cents per kwh
BOSTON 25.99 cents per kwh

The number one reason to keep both municipal and provincial hydro companies public is the environment. More and more people are recognizing that the planet is in real trouble and most en-vironmentalists agree that a local municipal public utility like Toronto Hydro is where conservation, retrofitting and green energy programs need to be implemented. Private companies by law have to act in the best interest of their shareholders and that means profits are number one, not the environment.

Not much of a case for privatization.

Where are the demands to privatize your local hydro coming from? There are no public demonstrations outside city halls across Ontario demanding that local hydro be privatized. The demand is coming from Bay Street and the investors who are in the middle of "a flight to quality". After the "free market" collapse in the U.S. and the economic downturn, they are looking for a profitable place to put their money. That is, our public services.

The propaganda campaign is very much in full swing. The financial wizards are coming up with all kinds of scenarios and packaging from outright sale, leasing, public private partnerships (P3s), partial sale and even a super-corporation to sell shares to try to inject private profits into our public services. How can banks claim that public hydro utilities are not a good deal for the public when they are trying to buy them?

It's very interesting that McGuinty has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and CIBC World Markets to come up with a "blueprint" for privatizing Hydro One, Ontario Power Generation, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, and the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. These banks are hardly disinterested parties.

Goldman Sachs made a lot of money in the asset-backed commercial paper scandal in the U.S. that caused the current economic crisis. It appeared before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in Washington, D.C. on January 13, 2010. Goldman CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, in response to questions from Commission Chair, Phil Angelides, admitted that the firm's actions in connection with the sale of mortgage-backed securities were "improper." Goldman Sachs is also very much involved with the economic meltdown going on in Greece and the rest of Europe. Articles from Der Spiegel on February 8, 2010 and the New York Times on February 13, 2010 show how Goldman Sachs helped European countries, including Greece, to hide debt far into the future making the crisis much worse. Goldman Sachs used similar techniques that caused the sub-prime meltdown in the U.S. to enable.

According to the New York Times on February 13, 2010, "One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels". And now Goldman Sachs is going to come up with a blueprint to privatize and profit from the sale of Ontario's public assets? Turning natural public monopolies that serve the public interest into private monopolies, like Highway 407, will only make a few people very, very rich.

The last thing Ontario's economy needs right now is private power and its accompanying high rates. It's very simple - if you have private investment you'll have private pay-off, if you have public investment, you'll have public pay-off.

During the 2003 election McGuinty stole the main campaign plank from the NDP and promised public power. On September 5, 2003 McGuinty said. "Deregulation and privatization hasn't worked and we can't go back there. I've drawn a lesson from that. Number one, we've got to keep hydro public". McGuinty would be well advised to keep his election promise and restore public power in Ontario. The environment and the economy demand it. When the people of Ontario, especially pensioners and people on fixed income, get their first few "smart meter" bills, the people will be paying attention.