NDP slams Liberals on hydro rates

Despite her best efforts to reduce her energy usage, Thérèse Millette's last hydro bill, for her small Sudbury apartment, was $228.

“I'm wondering why we have to pay so much for this?” she asked NDP leader Andrea Horwath and Sudbury byelection candidate Suzanne Shawbonquit when they paid her a visit while on the campaign trail Saturday.

Millette said she uses her heating sparingly, but it has been difficult with this winter's frigid temperatures.

“How are you going to do without heat in a Canadian winter?” she asked.

“Ontarians are paying the highest electricity prices in Canada, more than twice what our neighbours pay, and that’s not right.” Horwath said. “The Liberal government says that sky-high hydro bills are just the cost of doing business – but they’re not. They are the cost of how the Liberals do business.”

She added residential hydro rates in the province are expected to increase by 42 per cent over the next five years.

Part of the NDP's plan to address high hydro rates, said Horwath, is to amalgamate the provincial agencies that make up Ontario's energy system to avoid duplication and overlap on people's bills.

The Ontario Power Authority and the Ontario Energy Systems Operator have already been amalgamated, she said, but more needs to be done in that regard.

The NDP has also pushed for the province to remove the harmonized sales tax on hydro, and to reinstate incentive programs when people purchase energy efficient appliances.

“If the Liberals are smart they'll actually take some of our ideas and implement them,” Horwath said.

Shawbonquit said Ontario's hydro rates are “devastating families” and added Sudbury's winter is just beginning, which means heating costs will inflate residents' hydro bills.
“The bottom line is greed,” she said. “It has nothing to do with quality of life.”

The Progressive Conservatives have also attacked the Liberals' record on hydro rates, but have taken a different approach to the issue.

During a Sudbury visit in mid-January, Progressive Conservative interim leader Jim Wilson said the Green Energy Act has increased household hydro bills by an average of $681 to pay for “unaffordable subsidies on industrial wind turbines and solar panels.”

In 2013, the Fraser Institute released a report called “Environmental and Economic Consequences of Ontario’s Green Energy Act” that concluded the Ontario Power Authority’s Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) program's rates have helped create excess green-energy production – especially from wind generators – the province must export at a loss.

The FIT program offers small green-power generators a chance to sell power to the provincial grid at a guaranteed rate.