TORONTO -- Premier Kathleen Wynne should take a lie-detector test if she wants the public to believe that she wasn't involved in the costly decision to cancel a gas plant during the 2011 election, Progressive Conservative Frank Klees said Thursday.
Klees said he finds it hard to believe her because she was a major player in the Liberal election campaign when the decision was made to relocate the plant.
"If she insists that as the campaign co-chair and as someone who sat at the cabinet table to approve this deal that she has no recollection, she may want to establish her credibility by submitting to one of those lie-detector tests, because I don't believe it," he said.
The opposition parties have accused the Liberals of cancelling the Mississauga plant and another one in Oakville a year earlier to save Liberal seats in the face of local opposition.
Two former cabinet ministers told a legislative committee that the decision on the Mississauga plant was made by the party.
The government says the decisions will cost taxpayers $230 million, but the opposition parties say it will be far more.
Klees says Wynne needs to show she's serious about getting to the bottom of the controversy by striking committees as soon as the legislature comes back next week.
The committee looking into the gas plants controversy needs to hold hearings as soon as possible, as well as another committee that's probing the scandal at the Ornge air ambulance service, he said.
Wynne has said that she's willing to appear before the committees if they call her to testify -- something her predecessor Dalton McGuinty refused to do.
But she has said that she wasn't part of any meetings on the decision to move the plant.
"I was part of the campaign team, but I was not in any of those meetings," she said Wednesday. "And if I am asked to come forward, I will come and answer the questions that I'm asked."
