Hydro privatization follies

The Tories and their Bay Street buddies must have rubbed their greedy hands with glee. Their new free market energy pricing system — the sort of power stock exchange that achieved such wonderful results in California last year — is working as it should.

But they haven’t had it all their own way. The sell off of the transmission grid — called Hydro One — was derailed by a groundswell of opposition and a good court ruling.

On top of that embarrassment for Oily Ernie Eves comes news that the top five executives at Hydro One — public servants still — have wrangled themselves a $13 million severance package.

Hydro One CEO Eleanor Clitheroe stands to rake in a lump sum of $6 million if she is fired or quits, plus a million-dollar pension plan.

Clitheroe took home $2,182,180 in salary, bonuses and benefits last year.

That includes $174,644 per year "vehicle allowance."

Clitheroe needs every penny of her $172,484 annual "vacation pay." It costs a bit to fund her hobby, sailing racing yachts.

Somehow, she finds the time to fulfill her responsibilities on the board of governors of University of Western Ontario, where she advocates deregulation, corporate "partnerships" and tuition hikes.

What does she do at Hydro One to earn her keep?

"I do a lot of winning the hearts and minds of people one-on-one," Clitheroe told the National Post last year. "Culture change is what occupies a big piece of my time."

In Tory Ontario, buzz words like "winning hearts and minds" and "culture change" can mean only one thing: paving the way for privatization.

Wherever in the world it has been attempted, power privatization has meant turning over valuable public assets at bargain-basement prices to corporations, big profits for banks and energy companies, inefficiency and supply disruptions and higher costs for consumers.

So in a nutshell, we Ontario taxpayers pay Clitheroe over $2 million a year to screw us.

Clitheroe learned her privatization chops as a former vice president of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

She then signed on as an Ontario Deputy Minister of Finance before joining Ontario Hydro in 1993.

When the Harris Tories appointed Sir Graham Day chairman of the board of the newly created Hydro One, he insisted that he would only take the job if Clitheroe were named CEO.

And who, you might ask, is Sir Graham Day?

If there were a privatization hall of fame, he would be Babe Ruth.

He was hand-picked by Maggie Thatcher in the 1980’s to sell off two major nationalized industries: British Shipbuilders and the Rover Group.

He went on to lead the privatization of a key sector of Britain’s power system, PowerGen plc.

He returned to his native Canada to join the boards of ScotiaBank and Sobey’s grocery chain, among others.

He was named Chancellor of Dalhousie University, from which post he has led the charge for the privatization and deregulation of post-secondary education.

Not content to engineer the destruction of public power and education, Sir Graham is also on the board of directors of the huge private home care company Extendicare. There he sits next to Liberal Senator Michael Kirby, whose recent report recommended two-tier health care.

Sir Graham saw in Eleanor Clitheroe a kindred spirit: "Eleanor is uniquely capable of doing the building process and making the cultural changes [there’s that phrase again] that I thought were necessary."

You might think that a power transmission company would be looking for someone with engineering expertise, but since the real job was to create "culture change" Clitheroe was the right pick.

She immediately restructured Hydro One, changing the culture of 25 per cent of its workforce to one of unemployment. Then she set out to "win our hearts and minds."

I think she has done a shitty job, since opposition to privatization is growing. But it is no wonder. She has no heart, and if she thinks we’ll sit still for this robbery, she’s out of her mind.

As for her multi-million-dollar "golden parachute," let’s demand the government rip up her contract. Bob Rae ripped up lots of public servants’ contracts a few years back, so we know there’s a precedent in our favour.