Officials appointed for Task force working groups

TORONTO -- Ontario's commissioner of public health is among the province's representatives appointed to three working groups that will provide support to the Canada-U.S. Joint Task Force force investigating the massive power outage that left most of Ontario in the dark.

Dr. James Young will represent the province in the security working group, federal Minister of Natural Resources Herb Dhaliwal said in a release Wednesday.

Duncan Hawthorne, CEO of Bruce Power, will represent Ontario in the nuclear working group, and David McFadden will sit with the electric system group for the province.

Premier Ernie Eves had requested representation on the task force itself, but Dhaliwal ruled out a top-level role for Ontario last week, saying provincial officials would have "an opportunity to participate and provide their input" through the working groups.

"The province will play a vital role in these working groups," Dhaliwal said in the release recently.

The task force was set up by Prime Minister Jean Chretien and President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the Aug. 14 blackout to investigate what caused the problems and recommend ways to avoid a recurrence.

Snubbed by Ottawa in the formation of the task force, Eves has tried to directly forge an understanding on the issue with two border states.

After separate meetings with the governors of New York and Michigan, Eves said he and the others had pledged to co-operate in their investigations of the outage that threw much of Ontario and large swaths of the northeastern United States into darkness.

Both states are doing their own probes of what went wrong and Eves wants them to provide the province with information they gather on the cause of the outage.

In turn, he promised to share data gathered by former Hydro One chairman Glen Wright, whom Eves has asked to look into how Ontario's electricity system responded to the unfolding power problems.

The Canadian Press