Since day one, we’ve been focused on ensuring that we have a reliable, affordable, clean energy system in this province. It’s remarkable for me, Mr. Speaker, to hear the energy critic from the NDP now standing up and championing gas in our province when at every opportunity he has slammed the use of natural gas—not just slammed the use of natural gas, but he’s also slammed our nuclear sector.

What we have done by introducing the bill last week—and we’ll debate it at second reading today, Mr. Speaker—is ensure that there’s at least one party in this Legislature that’s standing up for homeowners and new homeowners and energy customers, and that is Premier Ford and the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. They can be beholden to the environmental groups; they can be beholden to those who are ideological. We are not going to do that. We’re going to stand up for the people of Ontario.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker, there’s one party in this Legislature that is standing up for those who want to enter the home market. They want to buy a home in this province. That’s this party. The Ontario Energy Board’s decision from just before Christmas would have driven up the price of a home by, at minimum, $4,400. Our party won’t stand for that. But in parts of rural Ontario, it was going to drive up the cost by tens of thousands of dollars a year.

We are in a housing crisis in this province. Every time our party brings forward plans, like the housing supply action plan, it’s the NDP that stands up against it, Mr. Speaker, and this is the latest example of the NDP and the Liberals and the Greens standing up against the ability for people to buy a home in our province. We are going to stand with those who want to get into housing, Mr. Speaker, and make sure we’re keeping shovels in the ground in Ontario.

My question for the energy minister is—and first of all, I want to say that I’m glad that he’s living in a rural area and doing fine without natural gas at his residence, and that he’s not going to have to pay for any stranded infrastructure. But I want to ask him a really particular question, because he quoted one of the commissioners—one of the three, if that’s the right term—who wrote a dissenting opinion at the end of the OEB decision and order.

My question to the minister is, would he support the position of that commissioner to reduce the revenue of horizon to 20 years, leaving approximately a third of the cost of the new connections to pay up front and not on the backs of existing households? Would the minister support that?

There’s another reality. A number of you who are gas customers—in fact, almost four million of you who are gas customers—know that around 2022, the price of gas went up dramatically. Now, what was happening in world events at that time? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the disruption of the supply of natural gas to Western Europe, and frankly, you had a situation where the world market was setting the price.

We in Ontario pay a much lower price than people do on the world market. But something that you need to know—a few things you need to know. One, about 60% of the gas we use in Ontario comes from the United States. It used to come from western Canada; it’s coming from the United States. And in the United States, there are large numbers of liquefied natural gas export terminals that are shipping that gas out. In fact, recently, there was a pause put on a few of those in part because industrial manufacturers in the United States were saying, “These exports are killing us. They are killing us. You need to stop exporting all the gas, because it’s changing our cost picture.”

Well, in 2022—and I remember this, because (a) I got a bill, and (b) my constituents came to me about it—a big spike in gas prices. If you will remember your gas bill, about half is the cost of getting the gas to your house; that’s the pipes in the ground. The other half is the gas, and that other part comes from the price of gas out on the open market.

I want to say to all of you that although it’s unpredictable as to whether or not we will see other spikes—and I have to say, wars happen and disruptions of energy supplies happen, and if I knew what the price was going to be, I would be running a side deal in gas futures and making a lot of money, so I won’t predict that. But I will predict this: the potential for great volatility. That is a huge problem for people, the inability to be certain what it’s going to cost them in the year to come to heat their homes. That is an issue, and to the extent that we stay with gas or expand the use of gas in this province, we expose more and more people to the volatility of those gas prices. That is not a good thing.

I had said at the beginning, and I want to say this again: The OEB didn’t say you can’t have a gas connection to a new house; it wasn’t a ban on gas. If Enbridge wanted to install new gas connections to new homes, they could do it with the capital that’s provided by their investors, and they could try and recover it over the next few decades. But I have to say, they understand the volatility of the world; they understand the uncertainty of the world and the potential that within two decades or three decades, you’ll have a dramatically smaller market for gas heating in this province—again, I follow the minister’s statement talking about electrification of heating—so that it may not be a good investment for those people who are backing Enbridge. No, they want to put the burden on you. They have asked the Premier to put the burden on you, the customers of Enbridge Gas, the multi-billion-dollar risk.

So Premier Ford wants to raise your gas bill. He has decided that higher profits for Enbridge Gas are more important than protecting you. He wants to increase the money that goes to Enbridge, and he wants to take that money out of your pocket. He’s protecting his buddies at Enbridge and sticking you with the bill, and that’s about $300 for each gas customer over the next four years. And that’s why we’re debating this legislation today, legislation to allow the government to overturn a decision by the energy regulator, the body set up to protect you, the customers, from the actions of utilities that want to squeeze as much money out of you as they can.

Speaker, high price is certainly at the heart of what we’re dealing with here—no getting around it. It’s an issue that people have very immediately on their minds. They go to the grocery store; they try to buy something electronic; they have to pay higher rents; they’re paying their energy bills; they’re squeezed.

However, there are other issues here, even if they’re not as top of mind as cost of living. The reality is the world is getting hotter. Weather is getting more extreme. It’s getting more unpredictable. Those climate changes are affecting the price of food, of insurance and a variety of other things. They are increasing the cost of operating government because they’re causing more damage to infrastructure. Drought and higher temperatures are reducing food production in many places, and we see the impact at the grocery store.

It’s not just climate change that’s affecting us at those grocery stores. There are retailers—big ones—that are taking the opportunity to squeeze as many pennies out of people as they can. But the reality is that as the world gets hotter and our climate more unpredictable, food prices will increase. As insurers face higher claims from catastrophic weather events, they pass the cost on to their customers. I’m sure many of you have seen those higher insurance bills.

I’ll just say there are three jurisdictions right now where the rise in those bills has led to some really dramatic changes: Louisiana, Florida and California. Many insurance companies are leaving those jurisdictions because they can’t charge premiums high enough to cover the replacement cost of the houses destroyed in extreme weather or in wildfires. Those places are having to provide a very limited state-sponsored housing insurance, where an awful lot of the risk is left with the homeowner and where those states are not happy that they’re having to provide that insurance, because I’m sure it doesn’t actually pay for itself.

As we get hotter, as weather becomes more extreme, people are not going to be able to afford the premiums that insurance companies will charge to protect their homes and their property. This is not a distant problem; this is a problem happening today in the southern United States and which will make its way north into Ontario and into Canada. Already in Canada, the insurance bureau has said something like a million homes are facing the potential of losing home insurance because of flood risk.

So we’ve got a situation where day-to-day life is going to become more and more difficult. In order to stabilize the climate and protect us all from rising food costs and to make sure that things like insurance are affordable, the world is engaged in an effort to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. To do that, we have to move away from fossil fuels like gas. That means many things, but one of them is that when we have a chance to reduce future gas burning—from heating, for example—we should take it. We’re in a situation now where new homes, if they get a heat pump rather than a furnace and an air conditioner, can actually have lower-cost heating and cooling than if they went down the gas route. The OEB recognized that in its decision.

Happily, this would mean lower costs for homeowners. Let’s assume that Ontario actually does build one million new homes over the current decade. Given that so far the targets are not being met, I think there are real questions about that. Let’s just say you didn’t reach 1.5 million but you reached a million. We have about four million homes in Ontario now. If all new homes were gas-heated, then we would face a very large new source of carbon pollution in Ontario. I don’t know how the government would meet its very weak target of a 30% reduction, but we would be making the world hotter and we would be paying for it out of higher gas bills. That’s what this legislation means.

Premier Ford wants to raise your gas bill, take more money out of your pocket and make the world hotter, more volatile and more difficult for all of us. That’s what we’re debating today: the whole question of whether we will protect customers, whether we will let the Premier increase your gas bill or not. He’s protecting his buddies at Enbridge Gas and he’s sticking us with the bill, and we’re talking about $300 over four years. Anyone who wants to pay an extra 300 bucks to help Enbridge Gas, please put up your hand. I’m sure that when the vote comes there will be a chunk of people in this room who will stand up and say, “Yes, I want to pay more and I want to help Enbridge.”

Now I’ve talked about the direct cost and the, let us say, absence of facts in the arguments made by the government in the minister’s presentation, but I also want to talk about the impact of effectively restoring the previous situation where the Ontario Energy Board is just a glove puppet for the Minister of Energy—not a good thing.

It’s bad news to change the law so that all future energy decisions or regulations through the Ontario Energy Board will be made in the same way the Premier made his decision about the greenbelt or about Staples or about privatizing health care: out of public sight, by politicians on a massage table or in Vegas or at a wedding party where they’re celebrating and drinking wine with lobbyists. Do we want that to be the way decisions are made around energy?

Let’s look at how the decision was made by the Ontario Energy Board on protecting people from higher Enbridge rates. Again, I’m going to go back to the excellent article by the energy lawyer Ian Mondrow:

“At 6 p.m. on December 21, the OEB publicly issued a comprehensive decision on an application by” Enbridge “for approval of Ontario gas distribution rates commencing January 1, 2024. The decision is the result of a thorough public hearing process, which involved more than a year of review, thousands of pages of company and expert evidence, a comprehensive oral hearing and a thorough process for submissions by” Enbridge, “OEB staff, and a number of informed, indeed expert, customer and public interest intervenor representatives. The comprehensive, well-written and fully reasoned decision is 147 pages long....”

So what do we have? We had a public process that people could attend or follow. I followed it for the last year. Thousands of pages of evidence were introduced—I have to say, I didn’t read thousands of pages; I read quite a few hundred, but not thousands. Interesting stuff. The consultant for Enbridge—two consultants. One consultant, their economic consultant, talked about the threat of a death spiral for this particular utility, because as the cost of heating by gas went up, more and more people would leave the system, and as more and more people left the system, those who were left behind would pay a higher fee, and more and more people would leave.

So, real risk to the system—how do you manage that? Part of the way you manage it is, you actually focus on repair rather than expansion, so you control your costs. That’s something the OEB was very interested in.

Again, you had a public process. You had people who were trained in adjudication and had familiarity with the energy system listening to presentations by those who had expertise with energy, who were hired as consultants to give information. These were not lobbyists who were wining and dining the board. They weren’t taking the board out for lunch, getting them drunked up and then sending them back into the room. No. They were trying to present evidence so that, in fact, you could have a rational assessment of the options before us.

What does the Premier want in the place of a public hearing with evidence that could be challenged by numerous intervenors and by adjudicators themselves?

Well, first of all, this bill gives the government power to overturn the key decisions within that OEB order that’s under discussion. This gives the government the power to increase your gas bill, to take money out of your pocket and put it into the pockets of Enbridge investors so they get richer. That’s what this is about. The government wants to have the power to make Enbridge richer and you poorer. It allows the minister, with the approval of the Lieutenant Governor in Council—that’s the cabinet—to direct the Ontario Energy Board that the construction of a new natural gas transmission line is in the public interest.

Normally, the Ontario Energy Board would hold a hearing to determine whether a proposed project is in the public interest—does it actually do what it should do; will it put a financial burden on the other customers; is there a justification for this that allows an investment of the money that’s taken out of the ratepayers’ pockets?

This provision in the act would oblige the Ontario Energy Board to grant leave to construct without a hearing. In other words, we go to energy decision-making by lobbyists and members of the government’s cabinet, or maybe just by the Premier’s staff—I’m not sure which; only the RCMP knows for sure who makes these decisions. It means that the ability to actually have decisions or proposals reviewed in public, with evidence presented, considered, challenged and adjudicated doesn’t have to happen anymore. It’s just lobbyists bringing home the bacon for their clients, and that bacon is you and me paying more out of our pockets to make Enbridge richer. It allows the minister, with the approval of the cabinet, to overturn any OEB order that either refused to approve a gas transmission line or required the beneficiaries of the expansion to pay upfront capital costs. In other words, if the OEB determines that a gas pipeline project is not in the public interest, then the cabinet can force the OEB to let it proceed anyway.

At this point, you have to ask: Why do you have a regulator? Because, frankly, they’re just scenery. They’re a mountain picture painted on a wall. They are of no consequence, because the real decisions will be made by lobbyists, cabinet members and the chiefs of staff who report to the Premier and those ministers.

There are other ways that Bill 165 would allow the Premier to force gas customers to pay costs that the OEB would otherwise not allow. Currently, no one can construct a new gas pipeline in Ontario unless the OEB determines this expenditure is in the public interest and grants leave to construct. This rule seeks to ensure that expenditures are properly scrutinized so gas consumers are not forced to pay for costly, uneconomical projects. So by deciding to allow politicians to make that ultimate call as to whether or not a gas line is in the public interest, instead of an independent regulator, there’s a risk—man, sometimes I really understate. This politicizes the energy regulation process. It just says, “Nope.” Thoughtful consideration—may I even say, just businesslike consideration—is out the window; it’s who has got the pull, who knows who and who can actually get the decision that you need.

There is an example of a previous government that operated this way: the Liberal government. For those who weren’t here when they were in power—

I listened intently to the member from Davenport, the opposition critic. I have to say, I’m not sure what kind of dream world the members opposite are living in, but to try to say that in rural communities like mine in Niagara West, it’s going to cost $300 to pay upfront for the cost of bearing the natural gas infrastructure, and to say they can simply all get heat pumps—again, we’ve gone through this. We’ve heard from the Minister of Energy about those days when he’s at a lower temperature, he needs his natural gas to kick in, he needs to see the assistance from other areas. And I know in my riding, that’s the exact same thing.

So the member opposite, does he genuinely not understand the meaning of cost avoidance? He kept going on about this $300 and how little it’s going to cost the people of Ontario to do this. So we understand he’s in favour of forcing this on the hard-working, first-time homebuyers of Ontario. How much is it going to cost communities in my riding if the NDP had their way and they forced this down their throats?

I want to thank the member for Toronto–Danforth, not Davenport, for that great presentation. I also just want to note, you mentioned that the minister enjoys the benefits of a heat pump for a home that is not serviced by gas.

I was surprised—because I’ve read the 147-page report that you referenced in your remarks—when the minister said that the Independent Electricity System Operator was not consulted, was not involved, because if you refer to page 5 of the report, what the OEB says is that, in fact, the IESO was one of the people who contributed to the years’ worth of research, the over 10,000 pages of evidence that the OEB came to a decision.

I guess I’m asking the member to reflect upon the conflicting position of the minister. Is he the minister for energy or is he the minister for Enbridge?

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.

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.

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.

This bill doesn’t apply to the Natural Gas Expansion Program—so yeah.

Thank you to my colleague across the way for his remarks. Building off of the member from Niagara West’s question, I know there is some confusion amongst the Liberal Party members, especially their leader, around answering tough questions. So yes or no to the member opposite: Do you support natural gas expansion in rural Ontario? Yes or no?