McFadyen, Chomiak join local candidates on campaign trail

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This article was published 29/09/2011 (5504 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Senior members of both the NDP and Progressive Conservatives were in the Wheat City yesterday, shoring up support in the waning days of Manitoba’s general election campaign.

With some pundits suggesting next week’s election could go right down to the wire in Brandon, PC Leader Hugh McFadyen and NDP cabinet minister Dave Chomiak both made appearances in the city Wednesday, though neither brought new campaign announcements along with them.

Joined by local NDP candidates Jim Murray and Drew Caldwell on the steps of senior Eugenia Lulashnyk’s home in Brandon’s university area, Chomiak stressed that a Tory government would privatize Manitoba Hydro, despite McFadyen’s suggestions that he has been misquoted and misinterpreted on the issue.

“McFadyen’s gone on record as saying that he wanted to privatize parts of Hydro, they now want to go to market rates. When they were in power, they bought Centra Gas. It was being set up to be privatized,” Chomiak said. “The record speaks for itself. The best indication of future behaviour is past behaviour.”

Chomiak, the NDP candidate for Winnipeg’s Kildonan constituency and the party’s most recent energy minister, stressed that he came to Brandon yesterday not to throw more gas on the election trail firestorm that has been Hydro, but to discuss the Crown corporation as a “salient” issue for Manitoba’s future.

“Hydro is part of economic growth in this province,” he said. “As the minister of energy, companies come through (my office) all the time and there’s a lot of companies, locally and internationally, who want to come to Manitoba. One of the attractive features in Manitoba is our stable hydro rates and our capacity and volume of hydro.

“Energy is the future of this country and so it is worth talking about.”

McFadyen’s ears were likely burning during the NDP’s mid-afternoon media opportunity, however, as he was just across the city in Brandon’s east end, door-knocking with his Brandon candidates, Mike Waddell and Reg Helwer.

In response to the NDP’s claims, McFadyen says he has been very clear in saying he would not privatize Hydro and passed it off as “Desperate Dave and Desperate Drew trying to scare people in the lead-up to a vote.”

He also suggests that the NDP’s claim that the average hydro bill would go up by at least $600 per year under a Tory government is a red herring, because his party believes in keeping rates regulated by the Public Utilities Board.

“(In 2008), there was a discussion about we should be looking at that as a policy and I said at the time that that should be examined,” he said. “We did examine it and we concluded that it was the wrong way to go.”

The NDP’s suggestion of Alberta market rates as a gauge of what’s to come under a Tory government is “smoke and mirrors,” McFadyen added, because Manitoba doesn’t sell power to that province.

“That’s not the relevant comparison. The relevant comparison is the market that we actually sell into. We don’t sell power into Alberta or Ontario or anywhere other than into the Midwest of the United States,” he said. “But the point is moot. We don’t believe in regulated pricing and the only people pushing rates up are the NDP because of the overspending on the Bipole III line.”

Manitobans go to the polls to elect their next provincial government on Tuesday.

» adowd@brandonsun.com