The leader of the Ontario NDP party wants to undo a decision made by the governing Liberals, and bring the ownership of Hydro One back under the public umbrella.
Andrea Horwath, the party’s leader, discussed this notion along with other key points from the NDP’s newly released hydro plan, in a one-on-one interview in Wallaceburg with the Sydenham Current on Tuesday.
Bringing Hydro One back in-house
“The hydro system has become such a mess in the last number of years and we are gonna fix that too,” Horwath told the Sydenham Current.
“We are going to bring Hydro One back into the public ownership. Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals went ahead and started selling off Hydro One without the permission of the people of Ontario. 80% of Ontarians did not want Hydro One to be sold off, but she ignored them and went ahead and sold off. Already they have sold off 30%.”
Horwath said this was a mistake.
“We are going to bring it back in house, she said.
“We are going to bring it back into the public realm. We are going to restore the oversight, so we are going to restore the watch dogs: the Auditor General, the Ombudsman, the Financial Accountability Officer. None of those folks can look at Hydro One anymore. It has no oversight at all. We are going to turn that around, bring the oversight back, bring the utility back into public hands so that it’s operated in the best interest of Ontarians again.
Looking into private contracts
Within their plan, Horwath said the NDP are going look into some of the embedded costs to the system and make sure it gets dealt with.
“That means the private contracts that are not a good deal for Ontarians are going to be aggressively renegotiated and where we can get those savings, we will,” she said.
“If there are contracts that are so egregious, then the cancelling of that contract is actually better than maintaining it and then we will consider that as well, but we will be eyes wide open.”
If elected as the government in 2018, Horwath said the NDP will not “willy-nilly cancel projects” without knowing how it is going to impact people.
“We saw the folly of that when the Liberals cancelled the gas plants in Mississauga and Oakville… it cost us a $1 billion dollars. That is not acceptable,” Horwath said.
“So we certainly won’t do anything irresponsible like that. However, we do need to look at those contacts because it is the private profits in the system that we are paying for, through the nose on our electricity bills. When you pay for your electricity, you should be paying for electricity. Not for the private profits of some company, some foreign company for that matter. We should be paying for electricity. That is the way it used to be in Ontario, but the Conservatives started selling off hydro off back in the 90’s.”
Horwath said the Conservative Party started deregulating and privatizing the electricity system, and the Liberals have continued to do more of this privatization.
“Signing more contracts, both in traditional energy sources like gas but also in renewables. They have gone completely privatized with renewables and when we are stuck with these contracts, that are really lucrative for those private companies, they are making money hand over fist for their share holders. Their profit margins I am sure are huge, but we are the ones that are paying for that on our electricity bills and it should not be there.”
NDP wants to bring Manitoba/Quebec type system forward
Horwath said the NDP look favourably to Ontario’s two neighbouring provinces – Manitoba and Quebec – whose hydro systems are completely public and have not gone private.
“They are charged less than half of what we are being charged here in Ontario,” Horwath said.
“Their bills are less than half of our bills and that is residential as well as industrial and well as commercial. Across the board, people are paying less for hydro in Manitoba and Quebec.”
Horwath said Ontario needs to bring in that kind of system, and that is what the NDP plan to do.
“The kind of system where the public interest is primary and our electricity system is not in private interests. In a nut shell, that is our goal.
Horwath said her party plans to get rid of all the excess power being generated as well.
“They are sending (excess power) across the border practically for free, while we are subsidizing the cost of generating that electricity,” she said.
“We are not using it, so we are dumping it on the spot market and we are not getting enough revenue from it in the first place and we are generating far too much. A number of these contracts that have been signed, ones that were signed by Conservatives over the years and some of the early ones from the Liberals. Some of those are coming due . So we are going to have a chance to decide, do we need to resign? Do we need to bring that in-house? Do we need that power at all?”
Horwath discussed some of the NDP’s immediate plans for hydro in Ontario in this article: Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath visits Wallaceburg
Learn more about the new NDP plan, here.
Watch for more coverage stemming from our interview with the provincial NDP leader.
– Photo credit: Aaron Hall
