There is nothing fancy or complicated or even especially thoughtful about it.
Tim Hudak has identified two things that annoy Ontarians about their energy bills - the recently added sales tax and the long-standing "debt retirement charge" - and promised to get rid of them. That might require clever bookkeeping and behind-the-scenes bartering, and the economics are a little wonky. But the Progressive Conservative Leader can condense the promises into a single sentence voters can easily identify with, and that's good enough for him.
It's the kind of pitch Dalton McGuinty's Liberals are incapable of making. And that leaves them ill-positioned to win the debate over energy policy, which has emerged as a defining issue - a way for the populist opposition to label the government as out of touch - heading into this year's provincial election campaign.
When the Liberals took office in 2003, shortly after a massive blackout, the main energy concern was reliability. Their reward for addressing that with infrastructure investments - on top of which they piled an ambitious green-energy strategy, and the introduction of a harmonized sales tax - is that the public's focus has shifted to cost. Now, Mr. McGuinty is on less comfortable ground.
The Premier is better at providing blanket reassurances about service delivery than speaking in snappy sound bites about protecting Ontarians' wallets. And any government that's spent eight years dealing with energy policy, the murkiest of provincial files, is liable to become so bogged down that it's incapable of speaking in terms most can understand.
The Liberals are aware of the public's mood; last fall, they provided some price relief. But they did so in about the most confusing manner possible: with a time-limited "Clean Energy Benefit" that will provide a 10-per-cent rebate during a five-year period in which costs are projected otherwise to go up by 46 per cent.
The Liberals' relief was more creative and probably more responsible than what is being proposed by the Tories, and for that matter, the provincial New Democrats, who first called for the provincial portion of the HST to be dropped from energy (and home heating) bills. But politically, it can't compete. To most Ontarians, the rebate probably just looks like another line on their already overcrowded bills, as opposed to taking off two bothersome ones.
Meanwhile, the Tories are able to highlight other irritants to advance an oversimplified explanation for price increases. It's about "bloated bureaucracy," so they would scrap the Ontario Power Authority. It's about "sweetheart deals," so they would back out of the government's green-energy deal with Samsung. It's about "expensive energy agreements," so they would reduce premiums being paid to smaller wind and solar developers.
None of this tells the full story of skyrocketing bills, which to date have had more to do with previous decades of energy-grid neglect. But good luck to the Liberals trying to explain that.
Their only hope of winning this particular debate is somehow to turn the focus away from prices. So they're issuing dark warnings that Mr. Hudak would end the phase-out of "dirty coal," and accusing him of plotting to kill thousands of green-energy jobs.
But it would take rock-solid faith in the Liberals' investments to trump the cost concerns - and the various backtracks in their green-energy strategy, some of them inevitable when entering uncharted waters, have complicated even their most solid arguments.
Common political wisdom would suggest that Mr. McGuinty should be doing everything he can to change the subject entirely, which many Liberals would prefer. Instead, he seems to be doubling down on energy - seizing every opportunity to talk about the merits of his policies, and the folly of Mr. Hudak's.
Mr. McGuinty's hope is that, once voters start paying closer attention, they'll decide Mr. Hudak is just a reckless opportunist trying to buy their votes. And if the costing in the Tories' coming platform release is full of holes, that's not outside the realm of possibility.
Energy debates, though, are a whole lot easier to win from opposition than from government. One day, Mr. Hudak may get bogged down in power policy the way Mr. McGuinty is now, and other premiers were before. But for now, he has the luxury of keeping it simple.
Adam Radwanski