The King Weekly Sentinel may not be your go-to source for provincial news, but it does offer solid coverage of local affairs, from the near completion of a new carbon neutral recreation centre in King Township to a fundraising carwash for firefighters.
There are also lots of ribbon-cutting photos (and ads) with local MPP and now Minister of Energy and Electrification Stephen Lecce, which may explain why the paper’s publisher turned white when he started getting complaints about an ad placed by us stating the simple indisputable fact that Ontario’s electricity supply is getting dirtier.
Apparently, certain interests didn’t much appreciate having this fact made public in a full colour ad in the local paper (page 11). Maybe the ad on an earlier page noting the completion of an (insufficient, in our view) environmental review of a proposed expansion of the fossil-gas fired York Energy Centre didn’t capture the same concern among these “interests”. But there it was in black and white – exactly what our ad was talking about: the province’s growing reliance on polluting gas power.
Strangely, the King Sentinel then decided that based on these undisclosed “complaints”, our ad was misleading and refused to run two additional ads from us on the benefits of tripling Ontario’s wind and solar power. We promptly supplied the paper with the factual evidence to back our position, straight from the province’s own Independent Electricity System Operator. Their response to this iron-clad evidence? Crickets.
A “legal review” of the accuracy of our ad seems to have been lost in the paper’s lawyer’s overflowing holiday inbox. So maybe instead the paper’s publisher should read the article by David Suzuki published on page 5 of the same edition calling for an end to burning fossil fuels to understand what we are on about.
We don’t expect everyone who reads the paper to agree with us that we need to stop burning polluting fossil gas. Certain major interests will find continued gas burning hugely profitable. But we do expect that if the paper is going to insist on “accuracy,” it should do some real homework.
Many of its readers fought the construction of the money-wasting York Energy Centre gas plant tooth and nail. And many do not support its expansion or the province’s growing reliance of climate-wrecking gas. Instead of pretending that it has substantive concerns about a statement that could be fact checked in mere minutes, it should dig into what’s really going on with gas burning in Ontario – and in its own backyard.
You can send the paper’s Publisher a message urging him to stop censoring our ads about how wind and solar energy can lower our electricity bills, create jobs and help to phase-out the York Energy Centre gas plant in King Township. Email Ray Stanton < rays@londonproperty.ca >