It’s interesting listening to the energy minister talk about the past and the history. I will say that when the Liberals were in power, the PCs used to criticize their politicization of the electricity planning and their disregard for evidence and professional independent analysis. And yet here we are, 2024, the first time ever overruling an Ontario Energy Board decision designed to protect homeowners and ratepayers in order to benefit a fossil fuel giant.

Kent Elson, a lawyer from Environmental Defence says that this legislation, and the choice of the title of this bill, is “Orwellian.

“It should be called the keeping Enbridge profits and energy bills high act....

“The OEB decision would have cut capital costs covered by gas customers by approximately $600 per customer.... Reversing the decision will certainly raise energy bills.”

Why did you not title this bill the pushing energy costs up act in Ontario?

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.