EDITORIAL PAGE NDP fails to face reality

Much dissension and flak pertaining to the New Democratic Party of Ontario’s initial budget has been voiced in the national press and across the airwaves. Anything we could write here would be almost redundant. But the budget certainly does emit a foul odor.

Remember those “Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark” bumper stickers that appeared throughout western Canada after Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals enacted the nefarious National Energy Program? Well, we wouldn’t be too surprised to see something like those stickers reappear again, for this is a budget that will hurt Canadians from coast to coast.

Ontario will be held up to ridicule. Now those many other Canadians who like to lambaste that once-prosperous province have just been handed a legitimate reason to so do, for that budget promises to again injure national economic equilibrium.

As we see it, the only real winners besides the growing family of welfare recipients will be Preston Manning’s fledgling Reform party. Watch the next Gallop poll. The spend-spend-spend thinking of Ontario’s New Democrats is exemplified with the club they hold over Ontario Hydro. For down the line Hydro does stand to derive a substantial saving with the cancellation of its long-term contract to purchase uranium from Denison Mines at Elliot Lake.

Bandying a cost-saving figure of “$500 million or more” about, Northern Development Minister Shelley Martel has suggested to the legislature that this money be spent at Elliot Lake to diversify that hard-pressed community’s economy on such targets as retirement living and combating drug and alcohol abuse.

But before writing those cheques, we wonder if that Honorable Minister is aware of the huge cost of closing down and cleaning up that massive uranium mine – a figure that some operators tell us could well run into the hundreds of millions of dollars under the Ontario government’s new and rigid closing requirements.

Who is to pay? Denison is broke. The directors and officers? Hardly any buyers will be interested until that land is cleaned up to government requirements.

This would seem to leave Ontario Hydro holding the bag.

Buying uranium from the Elliot Lake mines has already cost Ontario Hydro $1.2 billion more than the going market price over the past 10 years, Martel said in defending her government’s decision to allow Hydro to cancel that contact, despite previous NDP pledges to continue buying Ontario’s high-priced uranium when it could purchase Saskatchewan uranium at a fraction of that cost.

“When this government came to power it, for the first time ever, was allowed to see the confidential documents with respect to the contracts between Hydro, Denison and Rio Algom Mines . . . we were stunned,” Martel said.

We certainly weren’t stunned, nor was the mining fraternity.

There were even books written about the glaring difference in cost between Ontario and Saskatchewan uranium. Where has the NDP been on this rather important point? Even a schoolboy would have to realize that it would cost very much more to mine flat, narrow low-grade ore occurrences underground at depth than from open pits. And it’s certainly no secret that Saskatchewan’s mines are the world’s richest and best uranium deposits, grading 10 times higher than those at Elliot Lake.