I always find it unusual when this government that is about the free market decides to put their thumb on the scale and tip in favour of a huge monopoly like Enbridge.

The Ontario Energy Board found that it was cheaper to build homes designed in the first place for heat pumps than to retrofit them afterwards for natural gas.

Even the minister, at the committee, talked about—I think it was about 900 metres of pipe for a new home in Peterborough and how expensive that is.

So this idea of only relying on natural gas, this idea of doubling down on stranded assets that consumers were paying for makes absolutely no sense. I think it’s $14 billion in capital expenditures that will be stranded assets, paid for by consumers.

If developers want to put natural gas in new hookups, that’s on them. Why should consumers be forced to have natural gas and not be given a choice between heat pumps and natural gas? Let the market decide.

Questions, please?

I’d like to thank the leader of the Green Party for his always thoughtful commentary that he brings to the House. He does a great job. It was very enjoyable listening to his 10 minutes of comments. He cherry-picked a lot of interesting statistics that he threw out, and it’s a lot to unpack in a one-minute question.

He did touch on the fact that we do have very, very affordable and reliable natural gas home heating in our province. and it is rate-regulated. I think that’s really important.

The member talked about how people are moving en masse to heat pumps in Europe. Well, there’s a reason for that. It’s because the cost of natural gas across Europe has soared over the last number of years, far beyond the price of natural gas in our regulated province.

The question I have for the member opposite is, does he believe that the system operator, the IESO, is prepared to power all of those natural gas heaters—sorry, that would be coming off with heat pumps?

Does the leader of the Green Party believe in an orderly transition, or does he just believe in going all green and torpedoes be damned?

It’s always a pleasure, it truly is, to be able to speak in this House and today to talk about Bill 165, Keeping Energy Costs Down Act. This is a bill that the title doesn’t really reflect what the actual goal of the bill is.

We’ll go back a little bit. The Ontario Energy Board is an independent regulator that regulates natural gas prices. The people in my riding who have natural gas—I’m not going to sugar-coat this—like natural gas, because the price is predictable, because it’s regulated. Often in northern Ontario—and I have put bills forward that, actually, the price of gasoline should be regulated, because there’s often 20 cents’ difference between where I live and where it’s cheapest on my trip, which is usually north of Barrie. Then, when you get down here, it gets to almost northern Ontario price again, and that has nothing to do with transportation. That’s why we often say it should be regulated.

We hear this all the time: that while the government has taken 10 cents off the price of gas—they have foregone taxes, but in that legislation, they didn’t put anything that that 10 cents actually goes to consumers. So that 10 cents could have just as easily gone to the profit margin of the oil companies who control gas prices.

Questions, please, from the opposition?

I have a question. You didn’t mention anything about climate change or the emissions that Enbridge is responsible for. There was a proposal at a shareholder meeting calling on Enbridge to disclose indirect emissions from pipelines. Those emissions are methane gas—that’s what natural gas actually is. The CEO actually called employees and asked them to vote against this measure and also called shareholders. So I wonder if you think that a company should not be responsible to disclose when their business is emitting methane gas and that they have no responsibility right now to disclose.

Thank you to the member for that question.

Through the Keeping Energy Costs Down Act, the government is seeking to support fair and inclusive decision-making at the OEB to foster affordable communities. The OEB’s December 2023 decision demonstrated opportunities for improvement. For example, the decision noted that it was reached without an understanding of the impacts to the province’s electricity grid as the province’s Independent Electricity System Operator was not invited to provide evidence on the change to the revenue horizon. The decision also noted that impacted sectors were not invited to participate or provide evidence.

I find it rich, Madam Speaker, that the member refuses to acknowledge the fact that the only dissenting opinion here was that of a strong, independent woman. And I find it rich, Madam Speaker, that the member can stand in this House and say that our government is not listening to women, yet that member is ignoring the only dissenting opinion on the OEB which actually supports this piece of legislation.

Madam Speaker, I don’t even have natural gas. I have propane where I live in my riding of Carleton. For someone like me, a single person living in their house, the price of propane has gone up exponentially. It is almost unaffordable. So I can only imagine how much more expensive it is for those families who live in my riding of Carleton who rely on propane or even oil because they don’t have access to natural gas.

Natural gas plays an important role in meeting Ontario’s energy needs and that’s why I support this piece of legislation and I encourage everyone to support it as well.

Thank you to the member from Carleton for her presentation. I know you mentioned the importance for rural areas—of getting gas infrastructure there and getting the supply to those communities so that they can have natural gas. I know how important natural gas is as an energy source in rural communities as well. I just wonder if you could tell us, for your riding, is this an important addition to make sure we have the natural gas infrastructure to build new homes?

Further questions?

Not you, John.

That’s what it did.

That’s what it likely did, right? Because no one is going to tell me that gas prices that have any semblance of the cost of getting the gas to northern Ontario or getting the gas—because it goes up and down so quickly. The last one—the government was talking, and we’ve heard this so many times. And let’s make it clear that the NDP provincially have always been opposed to the individual carbon tax. The government blames every problem, every price increase, on the carbon tax. The increase in the carbon tax in April was two cents, I believe. Gas went up, like, 12 cents, so it wasn’t just carbon tax. It’s so frustrating.

That’s why people like natural gas: because they believe, and rightfully so, that because it’s regulated, they’re paying a fair price. And it has gone up recently—we have lots of complaints—but they feel that it’s fair.

It’s the job of the Ontario Energy Board, an independent regulator, to look out for the stability of the system and the price for consumers, because they can’t realistically—when a company that supplies the gas, like Enbridge, makes an application to the energy board that they need more money for their product, the way I understand the system, Speaker, is they make their case—I’ve been in business my whole life; if they can’t make a profit selling their product, the market will no longer be stable. And so, the energy board takes that into account and makes their decisions on where the price should be based on that, based on the facts given by the energy company and also by other independent advice. That’s where they make their decisions.

What makes this bill different is that the Ontario Energy Board ruled that it wasn’t fiscally prudent to amortize costs for infrastructure for 40 years when that infrastructure may very well not be used for the next 40 years. That’s important. We’ve heard a couple of people here, members on the government side, talk about, “It makes sense. It’s like a mortgage.” And I don’t advise anyone to take a 40-year mortgage, but with the price of housing now, if you take a mortgage for 40 years, you do have an expectation that when you are finished paying the mortgage, you will still have a house or something that is usable, that has equity in it.

What the Ontario Energy Board was worried about is that those pipes that the consumers are paying for might not have a value in 40 years. In fact, they may not have a value in 10 or 15 because as we are facing—we are not facing climate change in the future; we are facing climate change now. And as a result, there are developments. Every day, we see advances in how to deal with climate change, how to transition to practices that impact the climate less. I would think that the government would believe that, since they are subsidizing the production of electric vehicles by billions of dollars, right? So the government recognizes that there is a need, that the world is going away from fossil fuels, from carbon fuels for vehicles. I think we all recognize that. But in this case, the Ontario Energy Board is basically saying the same thing, that those pipes that you are paying for now, that we are using now, might not be—and you’re forcing people to put payments on for 40 years; they might only have a 10-year usable span.

So all of a sudden, people are making—someone has to pay these bills for those pipes. That’s why the Ontario Energy Board said, “Hold it, hold it.” So I welcome questions from the government. I might be totally wrong on this. But the Ontario Energy Board said, “Hold it, people should pay for those costs upfront when they build the home, and that way they can make a decision.” So if you pay, I believe it’s $4,000 or whatever upfront, that adds to the cost of the new home. When you’re doing that, then you have to make a decision: Okay, so $4,000 for the hookup. Let’s say another—what does a natural gas furnace cost?

Interjection.

The government has decided to overrule the energy board so that everyone has to pay for those pipes in new builds, even though they all know that those pipes might not be viable for 40 years. Basically, since everybody is paying for the pipes, not just the person buying a new house—and I get that. The incentive is, “Oh, well, since the pipes are there, we might as well put a natural gas furnace in.”

Interjection.

So, basically, it’s kind of an incentive to become an Enbridge customer.

One of the comments when we were listening to one of the speeches was that sometimes some of the government members accuse us of being socialists—

Questions?

What about a 60-year-old car?

Overrules.

No, not me. But when you have new subdivisions and you say, “Oh, and everyone else has got to pay for the gas hookups”—everyone else has to pay for the gas hookups so a company can have an advantage, so you’re incentivized to go with one company. Man, that’s like socialist capitalism. That’s like, you know, you’re forcing everyone or very incentivizing them, because why wouldn’t you put a natural gas furnace in when the pipe is sitting there and everyone else is forced to pay for it, even though it may not be the right decision in the long run for you, for the economy, for your costs and for the environment, right? So that’s why we’re opposed to this bill.

If the OEB made the wrong decision, then we should go back and look at that and strengthen the OEB. I don’t know if it needs to be. But to simply overrule it—I don’t think anybody in the province is going to say, “You know what? We’ve got an independent regulator and they’ve kept our gas prices fair and even, but we’d rather go with the decision of the minister because this government has been very good at making long-term planning decisions.” They’ve been excellent, except for the times where they have to backtrack and pretend that they never did these things; you know, the Men in Black bills: “Oh, we have to rescind this.” Maybe they should actually think this through.

Now, I’m going to go in a place where many others haven’t gone. Sometimes I pay the price for this. There are uses for natural gas, for propane in agriculture specifically, where we can’t transition yet: grain drying, heating. Some places, we need to look at how to get natural gas or some—like, right now, it’s natural gas. If some day we can figure out how to dry grain quickly electrically, that would change that, too. So it’s not that we’re opposed to natural gas installations where they’re necessary and where they make sense. This isn’t about being anti-natural gas. There are places specifically—I’m from a farm background—where natural gas makes sense, is needed, but not necessarily in new subdivisions where people have a choice or should have a choice. And when you subsidize one but not the other, then you’re not giving people choice.

And when you’re saying—every time I hear, “This makes sense because it will take 40 years to pay for it”—you know what? It’s one thing to take a 40-year mortgage on something you know—I would have no problem taking a 40-year mortgage—I’m a farmer—on farmland because I know in 40 years that farmland is going to be worth as much or more. But man, I wouldn’t want to be taking a 40-year mortgage on a car because a car is, at most, 10. But that’s what the government is asking people—

That car that I put on 250,000 kilometres, I do that in just over two years. So I’m telling you, I don’t take the payments on that car over eight years because after three years, it’s toast. But the government has no problem telling people, “Do you know what? You need to hook up these new natural gas lines, and no problem; you can pay them off”—or, actually, everybody else can pay them off, $600 per customer across the province—“over 40 years, even though you won’t be using them in 10.” That doesn’t make sense. It really doesn’t, Speaker. It doesn’t, and that’s why we’re opposed to this bill.

I get along great with the Minister of Energy, but you really have to start wondering if he’s actually the minister of Enbridge, because this bill is so tilted. It is so tilted. The OEB is the independent regulator and, all of a sudden, the government doesn’t like the ruling of an independent regulator and just—

So it’s not that you can’t be careful and say, “Okay, we had better look at this. We had better look at how this decision was made. If there wasn’t enough testimony, then we should maybe look back and ask if they can relook at this.” It’s not that it had to be done immediately. It was almost like they were more worried about the shareholder price of Enbridge than they were worried about the long-term energy sustainability not just of the province, but of the people who were buying those houses—or trying to buy those houses; it’s certainly not an easy task in Ontario right now for people not just to buy, but to live.

Living in Ontario right now is very expensive, and I don’t blame anyone who is trying, who has scraped together the funds to buy a house: “Oh, we’ll buy a gas furnace, because it’ll save us money in the short term.” But it won’t save money, or it very well might not, in the long term. So we would be much better off giving people the choice and focusing on the sectors that actually depend on the natural gas.

I’m going to close by—people say we don’t understand. The difference with grain drying is that you harvest your thousands of acres of crops in a few short weeks, and those crops need to be dried as quickly as possible. That doesn’t work with electricity. You need a lot of heat. In practical terms—we’ve got a big grain-drying facility next to my hometown, and the natural gas pipe going into my hometown is a couple of inches, but the pipe going into that grain-drying facility is three times as big—but it’s only used for a short time, because you need a blast of energy. That is something that natural gas is good at, is good for. That’s why most grain-drying facilities want natural gas over propane. It’s cheaper. We get that.

But we really don’t get why you’re trying to force people to pay for something over 40 years that actually might only be feasible for a much shorter length of time.

Such a pleasure to listen to a member of the NDP who actually understands that there is a need for natural gas, because not everyone over there—and I didn’t hear all your remarks; I apologize. But I did hear some of them. Sometimes I wonder how this member continues to exist in the NDP caucus, because he thinks a lot like us at times.

But seriously, we are going back and putting a natural gas policy statement in the window for the Ontario Energy Board, which should clearly understand our mandate, and that is to continue the type of growth and prosperity that our province is seeing. I think this member actually does understand that in order for us to continue to see the massive investments in our province, we have to have a reliable, stable, affordable grid, and that includes natural gas and nuclear. But I’ll let him expand on that, if he would.

Questions?

I always appreciate hearing the NDP House leader speak. I’m always impressed how he can do it with no notes for such a long time.

But I do appreciate the context because there is a lot of rhetoric when we speak, and we all do it a little bit. But time and time again, we’ll hear about how the NDP hates natural gas. That’s not what the topic is. I appreciate the context of natural gas and what it will mean 40 years from now, and that really is the concern on this side of the House that we have with this bill.

We are not confident that natural gas will be as popular 40 years from now—not that it will be completely gone, but people will be transitioning over in the same way that the member from Carleton talked about propane and not having access to it. There may be better technology in the future. When I first got my house it was hydro for heat. It was incredibly expensive, and we barely used it. We used anything else. So, why would the government want to have this amortization over 40 years for a company that makes billions of dollars?