An article in the 11 August 2011 Waterloo Region Record caught my eye today. Entitled ‘Horwath Hopes to Ride the Wave’, the last two sentences are noteworthy: ‘Some of the [NDP] leader’s plans to do just that include removing the HST from hydro, gas and heating bills and eliminating the smart meter program that she said “isn’t very smart.” Horwath said, “We don’t believe people should be punished into environmental sustainability.”’ What caught my eye was the phrase ‘eliminating the smart meter program’ – more specifically, I wondered what this meant (in more detailed terms).
For information, I went to the NDP’s election platform, but I could not find any mention of smart meters whatsoever.
I then did a bit of rudimentary googling, to see if I could see this explained more fully. The only information of relevance I found came from about five months ago. This passage, from the Waterloo Region Record (in an article entitled, ‘Critics Charge Smart Hydro Meters Cost Consumers More’), is representative of many published at that time: ‘Horwath called the smart meters “cruel and unusual punishment,” but said the NDP hasn’t yet decided if it would go as far as Hudak and agree to let consumers opt out and return to the old pricing plan. “We definitely think it’s a program that is not going to get the results we need to get,” said Horwath.’
Thus, the more recent quotation continues to intrigue me, and I will keep alert to elaborations of the NDP’s platform in this area.
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