Want to know what's in the 20,000+ docs on Vapour Gas Plants?.............."bring in the Mounties"!!!!!

Over 50,000 documents referring to the deal McGuinty’s Government was making for the Mississauga and Oakville gas plants are unsearchable and basically so wrapped up in coded and obscure language that it is taking literally a line by line read to decipher what the hell it all means!

We are talking a potential of ONE BILLION DOLLARS to move 2 gas plants in order to secure elected seats within the jurisdictions of the cancelled plants!

This is how OUR money is being manipulated and dispersed to various individuals without having any accountability to slow down the process.

The “Vapour Papers” as they should be called, are so ambiguous and coded with acronyms that it would take a forensic team months to unravel them.

Here for example is just a “snipped” portion of one e mail. If anyone can send a cipher code to decipher this gobbly gook, please do!

What the hell does this say?

—-~—–­
·:~t~_.\._’~CIY~da-iilllllr;er:~~~e:p.’alill_..d-·liltalleli ~~~~~~~ll!·tor,a.-…:power·pa.nt._’(TINn
‘f’iiJilleC’/.:t:or::~l . . . . . .· . . . ‘ . . . . .. . . .. . . 
:’l/pdated:JThlf:Oct;·Olo20J0’11i52i12AH 
·•·paul-BlisS, crTV>Toroilto 
;iThere·are-i!trOI.\9· 11\di~~~!s·Park has changed-itS mi!ld.·iit~buildil_lg;a ,giant gas­·”finidc:iel«b.’(tll!•l!lant-iri;’Oilklrille. 
:·,Sourc:es:ten.CTV N~sthe ·MCGuinty·.govemment “has been listening .carefUlly to local · -r~,ic;lents’ (Oncems ·all(lls re-evii~Jilting·-supply·neee~s:• 
···’Allil_fiirise”l!-t!WS:·ceihferer!!:e,ha$:been::~l)ed’.tot’l-;p,m.-•ir(Oillailllei-!SU9gestingg00d·news is <on··the-way•for.-~dents·whO hllve:beell·’fightlog-,the.:proJ)i)Silt. 
i,Oiitai:ili’Minlster bf Enem•Br.ld•.Duguid:and local UlleraFMPP Kevin’Flynn will:be in 
;~liJ!ance. 
·:The:•plant .coUld be built elsewhere, ·or•deliJYecHor!.ttlrtller.’study bHhe-site. ::\:ilst:w,eek;’O;okVIIIe:residentS•flew lnCrUI!Iildet Eriri•Bt«k!Wil:h tolllunth··a·high-profile ::campaign: a!lilinst IOCating’the’na.turat ga!ffadlfW ne;or hOmes. ,-&:be..govemmentwill nQt confi.rm wbetber it bas .chiJI,\ged itS mind until··l p.m.

To see a “searchable” version of documents related to this Gas Plant issue go to this site by Tom Adams who is attempting to complete a rather complex mish mash of Government documents so that it can be reviewed by the public who all have to pay for McGuinty’s election with their hard earned $$$$!!!!!

Gas Busters Part 8 – Searchable Documents Available — Ontario Ministry of Energy Oakville

Why don’t we call in the Mounties to lock this puppy down and start a line by line investigation to get to the bottom of what could be one of the biggest swindles ever to be exacted on the citizens of Ontario!!!!

Better yet, make all the documents PUBLIC and on line so the people who are being screwed, (you and me) can conduct our own investigation!

Letting politicians read these and make any sense of them is literally fruitless and could be considered biased! AND the pace that politicians move would make a turtle look like an F1 racer!

Vapour Lounges in the Vapour trail for McGuinty and his Cabinet?

As the “vapour” scandal on the Oakville and Mississauga gas plants broke open recently, it is ironic that City of Toronto councillors were debating if they should let City staff formulate rules for “vapour lounges” ahead of changes to the medical marijuana regulations.The “vapour lounge” news event co-incidentally broke on the same day the Ontario PC party released information on some of the 20,000 pages of documents associated with the move of the Oakville 900 MW  TransCanada (TC) gas plant to Bath, Ontario. In searching those documents the PC party discovered that the code name for the TC negotiations was “vapour” and uncovered a spate of documents they repute are associated with a cover up. The PCs allege the code name used was to hide both the costs and details from others. One of the interesting issues surrounding the release of the first and second set of documents is that the Liberals did their best to flummox the search for pertinent information. They did this by presenting the documents in a unsearchable format meaning uncovering anything would be a slow tedious process. A spokesperson from the PC Party advised me that they were required to print, in their entirety each of the 56,000 pages of documents (about 56 copies of the Bible) and review them manually.

Over the past several days, the writer tried to find some clues in just 6600 pages of those documents. The search is made more difficult as the thousands of e-mails are filled with acronyms used by the bureaucrats, politicians and their staff. In the search process you need to know what; MO, PO, CLOC, SOC, IO, M, JUS, MEI, etc stand for; making the job akin to finding the “needle in the haystack”. 

I did come across the word “vapour” but dismissed it as I thought it might be an acronym for some obscure group in one of the Ministry offices. The particular e-mail that I located with the word had the following sentence and was sent by the Executive Assistant to the Deputy Minister of Energy;

“Rebecca- we’ll need to put a hold in M calendar for a meeting, half-hour l think on vapour lock letters.”

The foregoing e-mail doesn’t say much and one could easily skip over it. The “vapour lock”letters were not in the initial pages that the writer reviewed but they may show up in the remaining 50,000 or so when I get a chance to review them.

Later I did have occasion to search through another 2200 pages which allowed me to confirm some of what the PC Party alluded to in respect to Premier McGuinty’s current Chief of Staff, David Livingston^1. (officially appointed May 3, 2012). Mr. Livingston was formerly the CEO of Infrastructure Ontario (IO) another Liberal creation that is building hospitals, court houses etc. throughout the province.  A prior article on the building of one courthouse by IO in Belleville indicated that it was being erected at a cost exceeding $1,500. per square foot. As the CEO of “IO” Mr. Livingston received a $366K salary from the province in 2011 a 14.4% increase over 2010 in the midst of McGuinty’s freeze on Provincial Executive salaries.After searching the documents it is apparent that Mr. Livingston carried more weight then just the IO, President and CEO title as he appears to have been involved with consultations/advice with the Deputy Minister, Energy and Infrastructure, David Lindsay, on several occasions that I found in the limited number of documents that I have looked at so far. Interestingly enough the dates on the e-mail are July 22, 23 and 24, 2011, almost a year before his appointment as Chief of Staff by Premier McGuinty.One exchange I found was an e-mail sent from Mr. Patrick McNeil, who at that time was Senior Vice President, Corporate Business Development and Chief Risk Officer at OPG. Mr. McNeil is now President of Barra Strategies Incorporated. In the e-mail Mr. McNeil sent to Mr. Livingston Saturday July 23, 2011 he said the following:

“Our accountants advise us that it would be impossible for us to book the GTs [presumed to be an acronym for gas turbines] at 225 million given we have no project. We would have to book them at grey market value. Also, our earlier work for the SWGTA  [South West Greater Toronto Area]  RFP suggest the GTs should have been about 60 percent or so of that amount again reinforcing our write down concerns.” 

As it turns out the OPA agreed to purchase the turbines for $210 million instead of the $135 million (or less) valuation Mr. McNeil was alluding to. The foregoing adds considerable weight to the estimates that Bruce Sharp made in his recent article in the Financial Post on October 10, 2012 that the move of the TC gas plant to Bath, Ontario was far more then the $40 million that Minister Chris Bentley said it cost.  This alone represents a minimum additional cost of $75 million.

In the meantime hopefully the City of Toronto councillors will quickly sort out the rules on the “vapour lounge” so the Liberals have a proper meeting place now that they have closed the doors at Queens Park.

Parker Gallant,
October 25, 2012

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