To the member across, thank you very much for your presentation.

The Enbridge Gas plans were reviewed by the Ontario Energy Board. It was a plan that looked at what was going to be happening over the next five years. The board then argued that the company’s proposal would lead to an overbuilt and underutilized gas system. They wanted to move the company forward to ensure that they were going to meet the needs of the future by moving away from fossil fuel towards renewable energy.

Minister, what in this bill actually does that for the homeowners and the future taxpayers of Ontario? How do we protect them from undue and unnecessary costs that this bill will actually bring upon them because we’re still using outdated technology?

Thank you to my colleague for this question. Of course, like me, he knows how important it is, because we had every municipality coming to us for delegations. We hear from all across Ontario the need to increase the natural gas in Ontario.

We’ve seen these projects now these days. I know a lot of farmers in my riding who want to have natural gas for their grain dryers. Now they’re asking for a price to bring natural gas, and it costs like $2 million to do one kilometre in a concession. We have the same policies or rules from 20 years ago, so I think it’s time to revise that and make it easier for people to have access to natural gas in the province of Ontario.

Of course, we all know that a couple of months ago, your party voted against increasing our nuclear fleet in Ontario. But I think we’ve got a great plan and we’re sticking to it, and I think Ontarians are pretty happy with what we’re doing when it comes to energy in this province.

When we heard the minister talk about his heat pump—I also have a heat pump at home, but some of these days when the temperature in the afternoon goes from minus 5 to minus 25, that heat pump just won’t do the job. You need the electric backup or you need a natural gas backup, especially in rural municipalities when sometimes the grid is not that reliable because you’re really in a rural region and we’ve got power outages. You can live with a generator and natural gas, but you won’t be able to do that with a heat pump.

That’s the reason why we think it’s important to have natural gas be part of our plan to bring affordable, reliable and clean energy to Ontario. That’s the reason why we see companies coming back to Ontario manufacturing.

I want to thank my colleague for his excellent comments, echoing the minister’s comments that we have a pragmatic approach here in Ontario. I would like the member to speak a bit about the difference between gas as a heating source as opposed to an electricity source. It makes up less than 8% of our electrical grid, yet we know that it makes up almost two thirds of our heating requirements across the province.

I’m wondering if the member could please speak to the ongoing role that natural gas is going to play in this province moving forward.

It’s a pleasure to rise today to speak to this bill, the protecting profits for Enbridge act. I’m beginning on a note of humour because we’re getting to that point in the afternoon where it can become difficult to listen to debate, particularly debate that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

I heard it from the parliamentary assistant just now, who’s my neighbour in eastern Ontario from a riding I love and grew up in, that the member himself, like the minister, enjoys the use of a heat pump. My question is, if it isn’t not great for the member and the minister, what is stopping the province from giving that option to every single apartment building, every single home, every single business, every single farm in the province of Ontario?

Let me tell you something, Speaker: I am a proud New Democrat, and one of the founders of the New Democratic Party, one of the modern exemplars of the values I’m very proud to stand behind here in this part of the House, was J.S. Woodsworth. What Woodsworth used to say at the House of Commons is, “What we desire for ourselves, we desire for all.” We’re not happy when we’re doing okay, because we’re aware of the fact that we all do well when we all do well. We all do well when everybody is given an opportunity to be their best self.

What this bill does brazenly—and I’ve had occasion in the last six years to see a lot of brazen pieces of legislation—is say, “I don’t care about evidence. I don’t care about independent regulators. I don’t care about what the rest of the world is doing in the energy sector. I am going to listen to Enbridge’s consultants, Enbridge’s lobbyists and the chief of staff to the minister” who, as I understand, used to be a lobbyist for Enbridge. “I’m going to listen to that advice and not the advice that could make Ontario a cleaner, greener, more prosperous place for generations to come.”

You know, Speaker, when I hear the disconnect from reality over there, it makes me think of the great playwright Bertolt Brecht, who wrote a reflection on authoritarianism—authoritarian logic like I’m hearing over there. He once wrote in a poem called The Answer:

... that the people

Had forfeited the confidence of the government

And could win it back only

By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

That’s what we’re dealing with here. It’s not the first time we’ve seen this government say “meh” in the face of evidence. There’s a big graveyard of former regulators and people entrusted to give advice to this particular government. What about the Ontario child advocate? What about the Ontario Environmental Commissioner? What about the French Language Services Commissioner? What the former member from Lambton–Kent–Middlesex; what about Mr. McNaughton? Do they listen to anybody over there when controversy broaches itself in their caucus, or are they only interested in what Enbridge is trying to tell the province of Ontario in this moment? And that is that the monopoly they have, the agreement they have signed with the province of Ontario and the profits they generate from it matter more than making the energy transition which is right in front of us.

I’ll be charitable to the government too, because there are elements of the province that can see it that work for this government, and they’re doing it. I’m thinking about the IESO, the Independent Electricity Systems Operator, which I’ve heard both the parliamentary assistant and the minister say were not involved in the OEB decision. Incorrect. Page 5 of the 147-page report says very clearly the IESO deputed. Their evidence was gathered toward it. Their opinion was not the one accepted by two thirds of the OEB. So, we can make up our own arguments, but we can’t make up our own facts, all right? The fact of the matter is, the IESO deputed to this process. The advice they gave the OEB was not persuasive.

But the question here, Speaker, is this: When the OEB, which is an independent body of this Legislature, gives a 147-page decision and tells us, as legislators in this place, that we are at risk if we give Enbridge the right to bilk ratepayers $300, that we will be designing, in their words, “an overbuilt, underutilized gas system”—now, that is not to say that this is a system that can change overnight. When I hear members opposite saying that, they’re technically correct. But that’s not the debate we’re having. That’s not the debate we’re having.

The debate we’re having is, what is the future? The 1.5 million homes I hear the members opposite talking about all the time. Well, let’s do a thought experiment. One expert who did actually contribute to the OEB’s study said that if we decided to build those 1.5 million new homes and we decided to heat them with methane gas, that would result in over 100 megatons of carbon pollution over the lifetime of that new infrastructure. Just for reference, Speaker, that is two thirds of Ontario’s total emissions every year. It’s the equivalent of driving 22 million cars. Ontario at the moment has just over nine million cars.

So if the government wants to please Enbridge and allow them to increase the gas bills of Ontarians to fund their infrastructure plans, which are not borne out by evidence, that has a consequence. In my community right now, people in Ottawa Centre are faced with the—I mean, you have to laugh, Speaker, because you don’t want to cry all the time. But we in Ottawa are really proud of our festival called Winterlude. We’re proud of the great canal skateway that we have, biggest in the world. Well, it was biggest in the world. It didn’t open at all last year. Didn’t open at all last year; we’ve had five days of skating this year. And who is one of the principal sponsors of Winterlude back home? Enbridge.

Many of us have asked the National Capital Commission, “Why are we doing this? Why are we working with a company that is pressuring this government, that is pressuring other governments to embrace forms of electrical generation that are counterproductive to our climate goals?”

Thank you to my colleague for his remarks this afternoon. I know we both represent rural ridings in different parts of Ontario, obviously, and obviously natural gas expansion is key to the success of our local municipalities, agriculture producers and families. I was wondering if he could elaborate on why it is important the government bring this piece of legislation forward to ensure that those expansions can continue.

Mon honorable collègue a parlé des collectivités rurales et nordiques. J’aimerais bien qu’il confirme si j’ai bien compris la décision de la Commission de l’énergie de l’Ontario en ce qui concerne la tarification d’Enbridge Gas. Je pense que cette décision ne s’applique pas au programme pour l’expansion de l’accès au gaz naturel. C’est-à-dire, cette décision ne s’applique pas aux programmes qui s’agissent de l’accès au gaz naturel dans les collectivités rurales at nordiques. Est-ce que mon collègue peut le confirmer?

Next question?

Further debate?

I hear the member opposite talk about heating. Well, if you look at gas-fired electrical, if you look at heating, we are talking about effectively the same thing. Methane emissions are 80 times the potency of normal CO₂. It is difficult to dissipate from the atmosphere. At some point, you have to reckon with the evidence. Maybe read the 147-page report, instead of just criticizing it.

The point of the matter is this: If we give Enbridge what it wants—if we allow the baby to cry and scream, and we give the baby whatever it wants; if we work for Enbridge, and not for the people of Ontario—and if we say to the people of Ontario, who many people in this House have said are struggling and hurting, “The 300 bucks is on you and not the company whose parent organization made $46 billion in aggregate sales last year,” who do we work for? Who do we work for? What do the seats in this House matter? Because the real decisions, as people have said in this debate already—the member for Toronto–Danforth said it already—are not made in this chamber. They’re made in the antechambers. They’re made in the hallways when the chief of staff for the Minister of Energy, who used to work for Enbridge, gives that gentleman advice.

So I’ve got to tell you, Speaker: It’s hard for me to sit and listen to this, because I want to believe that we want to drive an evidence-based approach to policy in this province. I want to believe that we want to actually make every single person better off by the decisions we make here, and that, frankly, is not what Enbridge is asking us to do.

Enbridge just wrote the city of Hamilton a letter—I’m sure my colleagues from Hamilton will be talking about that this afternoon—claiming that they receive no public subsidy, claiming that they get no beneficial arrangement like electricity and that those of us who are scrutinizing this bill are not representing the facts. So let me say this, Speaker: When you sign a contract with the province of Ontario to have a monopoly on the transmission of gas in this province and the Ontario Energy Board signs off on your return-on-investment target—which is 10%; 10% is what Enbridge is allowed to shoot for every single year—you have the support of the province, you have the backing of the province and you have, as the member from Glengarry–Prescott–Russell said, 70% of homes heated by gas at your disposal that you can raise rates on, provided the OEB lets you do it.

But this time they didn’t. This time they didn’t. After a year of listening to experts that included home builders, owners of rental properties, environmental organizations and subject matter experts, they came to the decision that was delivered on December 21, 2023. There were 10,000 pages of evidence, and a day later, the Minister of Energy stands up and says, “Well, this is the wrong decision. I’m reversing it.” I wonder how much research went into that. Was it a year of deputations, pouring over documents and science, or was it a couple of phone calls from a lobbyist that influenced that situation?

Particularly, it’s so frustrating hearing in debate today that the minister himself enjoys the benefit of this technology in his own home. Give me a break. If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for all the people we work for. That should be the goal of the province of Ontario.

I want to salute, actually, while I’m here, the IESO, for their work in trying to follow upon the example of the province of Prince Edward Island. In Prince Edward Island, if your household income is $72,000 or less and if the value of your home is $320,000 or less, the province of Prince Edward Island will buy you a heat pump, because they’re trying to encourage people to get off of very expensive home heating fuel.

We’ve heard a lot of that in our country. The Prime Minister, who I’ll talk about in a moment, got into some hot water over the heating carve-out and created a huge debate in the country. But the province of Prince Edward Island actually did something about it. They did something about it. They actually helped homeowners get access to the technology that the minister enjoys, that the parliamentary assistant enjoys, to help them defray their costs.

And I want to think that is a very fascinating thing, Speaker, because guess what political party is in power in Prince Edward Island? It’s the Conservative Party. And guess who the next most powerful presence is in the province of Prince Edward Island? Let me give credit where it’s due: It’s the Green Party. And maybe, just maybe, there were some discussions in that august House that led to evidence-based decisions.

The IESO is starting to do the same thing. Right now, through its program entitled the Energy Affordability Program, they are announcing to the province of Ontario that you can apply to have access to a heat pump. If the number of people in the home is one or less, we’re talking about $67,000 a year; two or less, $95,000 a year. They’re starting to roll out this technology.

But, Speaker and members of this House, has anybody seen an advertisement about this? Have you seen an ad about this program anywhere in the province of Ontario? Because I understand that if you go to the Los Angeles airport, you’ll see ads promoting how wonderful this government is, but I haven’t seen a single ad promoting this terrific program; this very reasoned, smart public policy program that would give renters and homeowners relief from their energy costs—not a single ad. Why? I think it’s because Enbridge is driving the energy policy at the moment.

I hope members of this caucus show up to their next meeting and ask the Premier and the advisers, “Why aren’t we promoting the energy assistance program? Why aren’t we getting heat pumps into buildings?” It would be interesting to see if we see new ads in a couple of weeks; I’m not going to hold my breath, Speaker.

I know this from the target set by our local officials in the city of Ottawa: They have said that if Ottawa wants to move seriously on its climate emissions for the heating of buildings, we should set a goal of 20,000 conversions a year moving to heat pumps or geothermal heating/cooling systems. Right now, we’re at 600, so we need a huge ramp-up of capacity in the very occupations so many of us in this building talk about all the time, because we love them: the skilled trades. We need those folks dispatched to not only retrofit existing buildings, but when new buildings are built, that we build them with the right tech that will make sure that we have clean air.

Some 45% of my city’s emissions come from buildings, so we have set that target, and we’re nowhere near meeting that target. We need a province that will do in Ontario what is being done in PEI, what is being encouraged elsewhere. Other provincial grids are very different. British Columbia’s grid is 88% hydro, 4% gas; Manitoba’s grid, 97% hydro, less than 1% gas. Here in Ontario, it’s 27% gas, and likely to increase, given what I’m hearing from the members opposite, as we refurbish the nuclear stock.

Is that actually the plan? I ask that question not only from an environmental perspective; I ask that question from the perspective of the women and men responsible for maintaining Enbridge’s pipeline infrastructure. Do you know that there’s no requirement right now, under existing regulations, for Enbridge to disclose any compromises in its pipeline infrastructure, underground or above ground? Nothing compels them to report to the province that there are leaks in the system. I think that should be a massive concern.

Do you know who raised that with me, Speaker? Not environmental groups; Unifor, the union whose members work for Enbridge, maintain the pipeline infrastructure and have told me directly they have significant concerns about the lack of money Enbridge puts into maintaining the existing pipeline. It’s their members who breathe in the gas, it’s their members who are directly exposed, so they have an interest in doing what I think is climate work: maintaining the integrity of the gas pipeline systems that we have, instead of telling Enbridge, “Yes, you can soak ratepayers more. You can soak them more to build more pipeline.”

Because that is how Enbridge makes money. Under their arrangement with the province of Ontario, with the monopoly they have, they don’t make money if gas costs more or if there’s a higher volume of gas in the pipe. Enbridge makes money when there is more pipeline built. But this House needs to make sure that the pipeline that is built works well and functions and doesn’t make people sick. But if we get all of these pieces right, Speaker—if we promote the programs the province of Ontario already has operating; if we follow the example of even other Conservative governments, like Prince Edward Island—we could be part of a global energy paradigm revolution that’s going on.

The member for Toronto–Danforth talked about Finland. We could also talk about Poland, which of all the EU countries has gone through the biggest transformation in embracing heat pumps. And why? So they can get out of the clasp of Gazprom and Russia. They want energy independence. It makes a lot of sense.

I look at the EU as a whole as a model for the rest of us. In the last year alone, there were three million heat pump units installed in the EU—three million. That has reduced over four billion cubic metres of natural gas. That is eight million tons of CO₂, which is equivalent to the yearly emissions of Greece as a country. That is progress.

But that’s not what we’re debating in this place. We’re not debating progress. We’re debating whether or not we want to do Enbridge a favour. We’re debating whether or not we want to make sure that they can keep soaking ratepayers, and nobody in this House says otherwise. We’re debating whether or not we can overturn an independent body whose job it is to give this province, and this government in particular, advice on the right decisions.

I get that the Minister of Energy does not like Mr. Patrick Moran and the decision that he mediated as chair in the recent OEB decision. We’re all entitled to our opinions. But as I’ve said already, we are not entitled to our own facts. The facts are leading us in one direction: warmer weather, more forest fires.

I hear from the latest information I get from the province of Alberta that wildfire season has actually already started to begin in parts of Alberta. I haven’t seen my family in interior BC in a long time; we have plans to see them. My wife and I were wondering over the weekend as we got ready, are we even going to go? Is the air going to be choked with smoke, as friends from up north will say?

What is the legacy we’re leaving for our children in handing Enbridge a gift with this legislation? It’s not a very progressive one. There have been Progressive Conservative governments in this province that have built hospitals, that have built schools, that have built positive things that have helped people. I think about the legacy of William Davis. But all this bill does is overturn independent advice and do a solid to Enbridge. I actually think not only being bad legislation, it’s a terrible stain on the record of the Conservative Party too, given that other Conservative governments in our very country are taking a different direction.

There is still time for this bill to be pulled from the House. There is still time for the government to declare actual action on climate emissions. There is still time to do what the federal government frankly isn’t doing. I haven’t had a chance to talk enough about them; maybe I will in questions. The federal government introduced legislation called the greener homes act. They had to cancel it a year early because of how popular the program was. They created a Hunger Games in Canada for people wanting to make their farms, their businesses, their homes more efficient. A $2.6-million program on a budget of $497 billion—woefully inadequate.

The province of Ontario can do better. We must do better. We have to follow the evidence. We have to stand by the facts. The facts in this case say we have to say no to Enbridge.

Questions?

What I’d say to the member opposite is the main reason he can cite that first figure is because Ontario as a province decided to phase out coal in our electrical system. It had absolutely nothing to do with the actions of this particular government—absolutely nothing.

Now, the innovations in the private sector he talks about in steel, those are real as well. But again, that has nothing to do with these guys. These guys have a job; their job is to set targets and to encourage us to assemble the facts to get there. They can’t just wait and wait for the market to solve problems. They can’t just hope that previous decisions will make their current numbers look good. They need to stand with the policy and the resources that we have in the province of Ontario and give people a way to make their homes cleaner, their cars cleaner and their businesses cleaner; and they’re failing.

I appreciate the member’s comments about following facts and evidence, so I’d like to introduce some evidence that was submitted by our Auditor General in May of last year. We’ve reduced our greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 by 27%. We’re 90% to our target. We’re leading the country. When we green our steel production and we get our small modular nuclear reactors online, we’ll be at about 35%. That’s a fact.

I’m impressed that you read the decision, but I’m wondering if you read E.B.O. 188, which is the policy which dictates how the regulator is to decide rate changes. And 2.2 says, “Specific parameters of the common elements include the following:

“(a) a 10-year customer attachment horizon;

“(b) a customer revenue horizon of 40 years from the in-service date of the initial mains.”

Will you admit that this is a departure from the status quo, that our gas bills today incorporate a 40-year window, and that the regulator has departed from that practice, contrary—

Next question?

Keeping Energy Costs Down Act.

I would be interested on hearing the member’s take on why he believes the government is so forceful on this when they blame the Liberals for doing the exact same thing.

I think the only way I can answer my friend from Hamilton is to say that this is a case of regulatory capture. I mean, it’s not only here in the province of Ontario. This Greener Homes Grant I was talking about before: The federal government embarked upon this piddling $2.6-million experiment. Guess who was the co-sponsor of this initiative, who you have to work with to get that into your home? Enbridge. Enbridge helps vet the applications for the Greener Homes Grant. What sense does that make?

Yes, we have to work with Enbridge, because they are the agents for those ratepayers, but there has to be a regulator. It’s a private company. It has a private interest. Some 90% of the situations in our city where people replace their home heating and cooling situation are when they break down in the wintertime. What do we think the rep says at the door? “Welcome to your new gas heat pump.” We need something that’s independent, that gives people good choices that are affordable; and this government is not doing that.

The fact of the matter is that the profitable places for Enbridge to expand to are the ones near major urban centres: the plans they have for Windsor; the plans, I’m sure, they have for suburbs around Toronto and Ottawa. That’s who they care about. We’re not surprised by the fact that Enbridge’s priorities line up for their bottom line.

Where we do get surprised and a little uppity is when we start making decisions in this House for a company that made $46 billion last year, whose CEO makes $19 million a year, while people are starving and having a hard time feeding their kids. We should be standing up for them, not for Enbridge. This bill is a disgrace for the province of Ontario.

The good news is that it’s not too late for us to chart a different course. We could actually promote some of the programs we already have, which I talked about. We could tell Enbridge, “No, you’re not going to get your handout. We’re not going to sign up on your corporate welfare. We’re actually going to make sure that when we give assistance, it is to the hard-working people of Ontario who make this province the great place that it is.” That isn’t Enbridge. Enbridge has a contract with the province of Ontario that they’re required to fulfill. It’s not even clear to me that they are fulfilling it, when I hear about issues of compromises in the pipeline, people getting sick in communities around pipelines where there are leaks. The fact that I haven’t heard anything from this government about those health and safety concerns bothers me.

We are going to pass this specific bill to make Enbridge richer. I think it’s wrong.

We don’t require Enbridge to tell us if there are any problems in the pipelines. And by doing that, we’re not protecting the workers responsible for maintaining those pipelines; we’re not protecting the community around the pipelines. Those pipelines aren’t going to go anywhere. We need them to be safe.

I’ll end on a positive note. The people of Ontario, who work hard, deserve nice things. They deserve a heat pump in their building and home. They deserve access to good public transit. They deserve the opportunity to have clean air, clean water and healthy communities. But this bill does a favour for Enbridge, and it doesn’t do a favour for them.

We should rewrite the bill. We should make sure Enbridge pays for its mistakes. End of story.

Thank you to the member from Ottawa Centre for his remarks this afternoon. He mentioned, who do we work for? Speaker, in this place, we’re members—the member opposite believes that we’re legislators, which we are. It’s a legislative assembly. They’re harping on the fact that, as a Legislature, we’re taking a policy decision to correct a mistake—very weird line of thought. But we’re legislators, everyone. So we can legislate, great, wow—so ironic.

But my question—he’s referring to the report. I appreciate he read the report. My question is—and I’m going to quote—do you support this finding? “I do not support a zero-year revenue horizon for assessing the economics of small volume gas expansion customers. I do not find the evidentiary record supports this conclusion.” This is from Commissioner Duff, in the report you’re quoting.

When will you allow natural gas expansion to places that don’t have it, to get it?

I want to thank very much the member for Ottawa Centre for that. I really want to focus on the part of this bill that is so egregious. I mean, the title of this bill is—

The very fact that, as you have stated, Enbridge is a for-profit multi-billion-dollar corporation. Their CEO makes, what, $19 million a year. This government would have us believe that Enbridge has the interest of average people at heart. It’s unbelievable. So the very fact that this regulated monopoly, this huge corporation, that has no interest and no plan for helping us with climate change—the only thing that protects us from them is a regulator, and this government has kneecapped the regulator. I find that unbelievable.

Could you speak to this political interference that this government has embarked on when it comes to this and judicial appointments in the province of Ontario?

I would like to also bring in the fact that this province has something like 40,000 abandoned oil and gas wells across this province that are a significant source of methane, that blow up in communities—we’re talking about some communities in the southwest that are represented by PCs, and here they are, not learning the lessons of that. They’re continuing to put infrastructure in the ground that has already shown itself to be risky and that they have absolutely no interest in regulating.

Can you talk a little bit about the risk to people that this expanded infrastructure poses—

I’d like to start by echoing the energy minister, who paid homage and thanked the late Richard Dicerni, the past chair of the Ontario Energy Board, whom I first encountered as a federal deputy minister for industry.

Mr. Dicerni worked under Premiers Bob Rae, Mike Harris, Dalton McGuinty, and then he got recruited by Alberta Premier Jim Prentice and was asked to stay on by Alberta Premier Rachel Notley to serve as the head of the Alberta public service.

Former Premier Rae remembered him as someone who “served all parties with equal integrity and thoughtfulness, and believed strongly in the need for a strong, non-partisan public service.” I want to emphasize this because the OEB’s mandate includes protecting consumers and making decisions independently of the government of the day.

From the OEB website: “The chair of the board of directors is accountable ... for ensuring the independence of decision-making by commissioners and others that carry out the OEB’s adjudication work.”

The energy minister has promised to appoint a replacement for Mr. Dicerni this spring—someone who he says will implement the changes in Bill 165 and who will make sure that the OEB will “reinforce the government’s priority,” which the government will outline in a new natural gas policy statement. I trust that the honourable energy minister will choose an independent OEB chair, differently from some of the things that we’ve heard the Attorney General and the Premier say about how they want to appoint Conservative-friendly judges.

That gets to my first concern about this bill, Madam Speaker: Regulating our energy system and deciding what eventually gets charged to consumers can get pretty technical. The OEB decision and order on December 21 which triggered Bill 165 was 147 pages long. That’s a really good reason for separating all of this from politics. In politics, partisan decisions get made based on whatever the average voter has time to listen to, and if the devil is in the details, partisan politics isn’t the best tool for sorting it all out.

Now, an important part of the mandate of the OEB is to protect consumers and do it through independent adjudication. With this bill, the government of the day can intervene; the bill creates another path, a political path, to try to get decisions to go your way. Donations and access to ministers will now matter. And we all know that when things get out of control—our honourable colleagues from the government side know well that when things get out of control, you end up with things like the RCMP criminal investigation, like this government is dealing with now.

I want to talk now about regulated utilities. Just by way of introduction, a regulated utility is allowed to make a fair return on their investments, and they can do it off of what they charge their customers for gas. Because they can do that, we have to protect consumers not only from unfair gas charges, but from unnecessary investments, which they will have to pay for because the utility gets to make a return on it. Making thoughtful judgments about things like what a utility is allowed to spend money on and recover the cost from consumers, and what’s a fair profit, are why the OEB was created in the first place.

As I said earlier, this bill allows the government of the day to intervene, to call new hearings on any matter and to specify through regulation which persons of interest may provide submissions to such hearings. This is how the minister is going to be able to influence individual decisions of the OEB, and lobbying the minister will now become part of the process of deciding what we do or don’t do to protect consumers.

The government of the day is also going to be deciding, according to this bill and the regulations, what’s called the revenue horizon. So if some developer wants to put in a new subdivision and maybe wants to put in gas, the utility—whether it’s my own Utilities Kingston or Enbridge—has to calculate what it’s all going to cost and what the number of years of revenue is going to be, to be able to cover that cost. The developer is going to promise a certain number of natural gas customers, and if that calculation is all going to work out, we have to make sure that the new consumers are going to actually stay with natural gas.

We know that that is not going to be the case. The OEB is saying we should be expecting that people over the next 10, 20 or 30 years—potentially very quickly—are going to get off natural gas, because technology is constantly improving, because there’s climate change pushing us to try to do something to help our kids and grandkids, whom we love dearly.

The problem that the OEB is anticipating—they’re trying to protect consumers, because if infrastructure is not being paid for, doesn’t get paid for by gas consumers because there are less and less of them, the costs go to all the other existing customers; all the other households have to pay more. Currently, what happens is the cost of the new gas connection is spread out over 40 years of gas bills of existing customers. Probably most people in this chamber right now will pay for new gas infrastructure, and because we’re expected to pay for it over 40 years, it turns out that there’s no need for an upfront payment to make up the difference between what gas customers will pay for and what it actually costs. And remember, it’s Enbridge, or the utility, who will always have the right to recover the cost of natural gas infrastructure, plus interest and plus a fair profit.

What this government is risking by overturning the OEB decision is not protecting homeowners, because all of us have to pay if there’s infrastructure left over that’s not being used. This is why it’s not just a pay-it-forward system. That’s why something different is happening here. Because our economy has to switch from using fossil fuels to using electricity over the coming decades, we’re going to have to do that, and that’s what’s different about now.

The whole trigger of Bill 165 was a decision of the OEB to say that because more and more people are going to switch to heat pumps, and I’m really happy to know—if somebody is worried about whether heat pumps work, just ask the energy minister himself, who told us today that he has got a great heat pump system with an electric backup. He has no natural gas connection, and he’s fine, so he’s a great poster boy for heat pumps. That is why I think the OEB is justified in thinking that the transition could happen very fast to heat pumps.

The OEB also said there’s what they call a split incentive program, so if the developer doesn’t have to pay any money up front for a natural gas connection, which is what’s happening right now, they end up installing natural gas every time. What that means is that one technology for energy is favoured over all others. One technology is getting a subsidy, a subsidy which all of us pay for—except for the Minister of Energy, who doesn’t have to pay for that subsidy, because he’s not on natural gas. So the Ontario Energy Board is trying to protect consumers.

Now, the government has said—when the OEB thought about this for about a year, they had thousands of pages of testimony. They thought about it for a year. They had a lot of people providing input. They argued over should this, what they call, revenue horizon, the time over which we spread out the cost of new natural gas infrastructure on our gas bills—there was a discussion over whether it should be something shorter than 40 years. But the government, if you go look at the Environmental Registry of Ontario, has said that it wants to “initially restore the revenue horizon at 40 years,” which only makes sense if you think that in 30 or 40 years—let’s see, that’s 2055 or 2060—everybody is still going to be on natural gas. That just doesn’t make sense.

There were some discussions that maybe the time horizon should be shorter. Maybe it should be 20 years or 15 years, in which case one third or one half of the cost of a new natural gas installation would have to be paid up front. These are all different compromises that the OEB was looking at, but the government doesn’t seem to be interested. It wants to put the revenue horizon right back at 40 years.

Now, to be fair, the government does admit that the OEB in the future may change this time horizon when the government lets it. So what happens if the OEB changes that time horizon from 40 years down to something more reasonable like 20 or 15, assuming Bill 165 goes through? Well, then everybody will have to pay back the costs of gas infrastructure faster, and all the household monthly bills are going to go up. And so, what the OEB is saying is that we’d better give the option to pay up front so that the burden of paying for this infrastructure doesn’t go on all the other ratepayers.

Let me end by saying that there are things that the government could do to avoid subverting the independence of the OEB and to do something positive, rather than just kind of going backwards, driving backwards, as we often see them do.

Did the government look at supporting what they call a negative rate rider? That’s where, if somebody pays for their natural gas connection up front, they get a discount on their gas bill, because they already paid for the connection infrastructure and they shouldn’t have to pay for other people’s connections.

Did the government look at allowing the cost of cold-weather heat pumps or a borehole for ground-source heat pumps, something which is inexpensive when you’re building new? Did they look at putting that cost spread over many decades on a property tax bill or an electricity bill? Did they look at ensuring that consumers don’t have to pay an exit fee if they decide to stop using natural gas? These are all alternatives that this government could have been considering instead of just going backwards to what we had before, because backwards is not working.

Here’s my final point. It’s a bit of advice for this government. The last time the government of Ontario had a long-term energy plan was in 2017, the previous Liberal government. Now, the government has siloed initiatives going this way on electricity, that way on natural gas, another way on housing and environmental policy, and nowhere on climate change. Through Bill 165, the government wants to be able to give directives to the OEB to hold what are called generic hearings and to bring in all sorts of stakeholders, really different stakeholders that the government wants to bring in.

Why is the government backed into this corner? It’s because the Conservatives ditched the idea of a whole-of-government long-term energy plan where housing policy and industrial policy and transportation policy and electricity policy and climate change policy are all considered together and planned together. The government has not updated the long-term energy plan that our province had in 2017. It has not had a whole-of-government energy plan. It hasn’t done the hard work of putting the pieces of the puzzle together and planning for the future. Madam Speaker, this is at the core of why this government will fail the kids and grandkids we love.

Questions?

Thank you very much to the member of the opposition who talked to many aspects of saving money for the end users and how the changes—and I don’t know. He said that the bill is trying to revert or restore the exact situation which was before the decision of OEB, so it’s not like introducing something new. It’s exactly trying to keep things as they were. If they want to put infrastructure, we have to put the investment and a return will be in 40 years.

Talking about savings—we can talk about savings. We can talk about scrapping the cap-and-trade carbon. We can speak about introducing the one-bill Ontario Electricity Rebate. So there are savings that we have been trying to do in energy, but this is about the infrastructure and the 40 years instead having to pay.