I am a ratepayer, and I am a taxpayer

A useful article appeared in 25 September’s Ottawa Citizen, entitled ‘Ontario votes: Wanted! an adult conversation on power — hydro, that is’.  Of the various themes presented therein, the one that I would like to pick up upon is with regard to the ‘transfer of costs’ among Ontario taxpayers and ratepayers.

With the assistance of analyst Tom Adams, the point is made that all three major political parties have policies to shift the cost of electricity from the ‘ratepayer’ to the ‘taxpayer’.  More specifically, the Liberals’ ‘Clean Energy Benefit’ takes 10 per cent off what are supposed to be the costs (at least in one set of calculations) of supplying electricity, the NDP would remove the HST from electricity, and the PC would remove the HST and the Debt Retirement Charge from power bills.

While politically-understandable – if not necessarily defendable – the desirability of such an approach should be questioned.  Rather than encouraging us to take ‘responsibility for our actions’ – ‘you use more electricity (in certain ways), you pay more’ – the burden is moved to the tax base, which is independent of your electricity actions.  To put more simply, the motivations to ‘do the right thing’ in the power space are reduced, and prospects for sustainability diminish.

Remember that all of these resources flow from various government pots of money.  In Ontario, government revenues are of the order of $106.7 billion (2010-11).  Personal income tax (22%), sales tax (18%) and corporations tax (8%) are the largest contributors to this overall revenue stream.   Given much continued public ownership in the electricity sector, if you reduce revenue to one bit, then either revenue must be increased somewhere else, or services must be cut.  There is not a free lunch.

I am a ratepayer, and I am a taxpayer.  I think it best to keep those domains more separate than some are proposing.

Kitchener panel

An article in The Kitchener-Waterloo Record on 22 September – entitled ‘Survey gives Ontario Liberals the edge on green policies’ – reported upon a community event/discussion in which I was pleased to participate.  Organised by Sustainable Waterloo Region, approximately 150 people gathered at The Tannery in Kitchener to receive a newly-launched report and to explore the province’s energy issues with four panelists and a moderator.

I was grateful to be asked to participate, and this newspaper article picked up upon three themes about which I spoke there and about which I have written here in the past – namely, the changes in residential electricity costs over time, the impact of time-of-use billing and the consequences for seniors of the same.  Fuller information about these issues (and others) may be found there.

NDP policy on smart meters

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.