Speaker, just so that you’re entirely clear about this, this bill is about making sure that Enbridge customers pay more and get poorer and that Enbridge makes a lot more money and gets a lot richer. That’s what this bill is about.

The Premier is planning to raise your gas bill this year. That’s what this bill makes possible. That’s what this bill is set up to do.

The Premier decided to protect Enbridge to make sure it could bring in billions of dollars from its customers and take money out of the pockets of those customers across this province. His buddies at Enbridge are being protected, and he’s sticking you, each and every Enbridge customer in this province, with the bill. That bill is calculated to be between $300 and $600 over the next four years.

Everyone in this room is well aware of how stretched people are, well aware of how they’re pushed hard by high rents, by mortgages that are difficult to cover, by rising grocery prices. They need this like they need a hole in their wallet. They need protection from Enbridge, and this government is not only not protecting them, it is making sure that Enbridge gets to collect billions of dollars from them—billions of dollars.

If you think that you should be paying more on your Enbridge bill, then you should support this legislation that’s come forward. And if you don’t think you should be stuck with those extra charges, if you think that Enbridge should be the body that actually coughs up the few billion dollars that they want to expand the gas supply system, then you should oppose this bill. Enbridge pays. That’s the situation that we would have if this bill did not go through. If the bill goes through, the customers pay, just as they have in so many other circumstances.

I don’t think I’ve made it plain enough: This bill is about raising your gas charges, making life more expensive for you and making sure that Enbridge shareholders make a lot more money.

This bill reverses the decision by the Ontario Energy Board—the agency set up in this province to regulate utilities and protect customers—the decision they made in December to protect people in Ontario from higher gas bills. Now, it’s the job of the Ontario Energy Board, that regulator, to look out for consumer interests when energy companies apply to raise their rates, as they do constantly. The job of the Ontario Energy Board, their mandate, is to protect the customers. They’re told, “Look out for the consumers. Look out for the public. Make sure they aren’t gouged, they aren’t ripped off, they aren’t pillaged, they aren’t silently stolen from. Look after those customers.” That’s their mandate, and that’s whether that utility is electrical or gas: protect the customers. And that is what the Ontario Energy Board did last December in, I would say, a Christmas surprise, a Christmas gift. They stood up and said, “We can read our mandate. We think this charge against the customers can’t be justified. We’re not going to approve it.”

Now this government is completely horrified that those customers are being protected. They’re horrified that Enbridge will not continue to make the crushingly huge profits that they’ve been making. And this government wants to reverse that. They know what has to be protected at all costs, and that’s the profits going to Enbridge. The customers? Not an issue, not a concern.

Since we had this bill before committee, the news service Narwhal published an article on the close co-operation between senior Conservative government staff and Enbridge. It was as if they were working in collusion. It was pretty clear from the article that the first concern of the government was to protect Enbridge and its profits. In what they reported, there weren’t big issues about, “How do we protect rural ratepayers? How do we look after small businesses? How do we make sure that new home buyers don’t pay more than they would have paid before?” No, their focus was on Enbridge’s profits and how expensive this decision was going to be for Enbridge, and then they looked for stories that would buttress the argument that they made.

Enbridge is a multi-billion-dollar company, and frankly, the one that we deal with in Ontario is a subsidiary of the larger Enbridge that runs gas transmission lines across North America—both of them multi-billion-dollar operations with multi-billion-dollar profits, not exactly on the edge of poverty. These companies have a few bucks available if they wanted to actually help customers, but that is not what we’re dealing with here. This is not about the government trying to protect customers and trying to keep energy bills low. This is about making sure that the company that wants to squeeze every last penny out of you is protected and given licence to do that. In fact, this government will ensure that your gas bill is going to go up.

Two weeks ago, we asked the Premier about his government’s efforts to ensure that Enbridge was protected and consumers got stuck with the bill. What do you have to say, Premier, on this?

So we asked: “In December, the Ontario Energy Board ruled that consumers should no longer have to subsidize Enbridge’s gas expansion. But instead of listening to the experts, the government decided to keep forcing consumers to pay the subsidy.

“Yesterday, the Narwhal revealed that the Premier’s top officials weren’t just communicating with Enbridge on this; they were actively coordinating their response together.”

Question for the government: Did the government give preferential treatment to Enbridge when it intervened pre-emptively to undermine the regulator and drive up costs for customers?

I’ll go on to the other two questions that were asked because I’ll summarize the response of the government.

The next question: On the morning of the Ontario Energy Board ruling, the chief of staff to the Minister of Energy reached out to the Premier’s staff and called an urgent meeting to prepare a response in case the OEB ruled against Enbridge in favour of consumers. Oh, horrors, protecting consumers; what has the world come to?

It just happens that the minister’s chief of staff is a former lobbyist for Enbridge. Was this chief of staff in a conflict of interest when he decided to put the interests of his former employer ahead of Ontario’s gas consumers?

Third part: Government lawyers warned the Premier’s staff and the former Enbridge lobbyists now working as the minister’s chief of staff that intervening in the OEB decision carried legal risks. They did it anyway. That’s why we’re debating this bill today.

They announced the plan to overrule the Ontario Energy Board, the regulator acting to protect customers—overrule them only 15 hours after the decision was published. I’ve never seen a government so determined to overrule an independent regulator and drive up gas bills for Ontario consumers.

Why is the government risking legal action in order to give preferential treatment to a gas monopoly over the interests of hard-working Ontarians?

Speaker, you had to be there to enjoy the show. No one will be surprised to hear that the Minister of Energy was bobbing and weaving like crazy to avoid answering the question. There were all kinds of diversions. Rabbits were pulled out of hats, red herrings were dumped on carpets, smoke was blown. The minister was a cat on a hot tin roof.

My experience around here is that when a minister can’t answer a question—and I’ve seen many over the years not be able to answer a question—then you have a minister with a big problem on their hands, because they like to be able to say, “You’re totally wrong; here’s the reason,” but when they dance and bob and weave and get into the red-herring stuff, you know that they understand they have a big problem on their hand.

We all remember the kind of—and I’ll just call it ambiguity in answers from ministers at the start of the greenbelt scandal. They wandered all over the landscape, sort of like a subdivision with no clear idea where it wanted to go. Why? Because what they were doing was wrong, wrong enough that they had to back off, bring in legislation to nullify those decisions, wrong enough that there’s now an RCMP investigation of the whole thing.

So far, we haven’t heard about Enbridge executives showing up at a wedding hosted by the Premier, but we’ve heard enough to know the government’s whole efforts are directed at enriching Enbridge and making life harder for families in this province.

This bill will strip Ontarians of protection from Enbridge’s attempts to gouge customers across Ontario. The minister, the Premier don’t have to do that. The Premier could take another course. The Premier could protect you, the Enbridge customers. He could protect your families and protect families across this province.

He knows that people are having a tough time. He talks about it regularly. We have debates, discussions, here in the Legislature, about the difficulties people are facing. People are pushed hard, as I said in the beginning. They’re facing rising rents. My colleague from Parkdale–High Park raised that just a few minutes ago. People are pushed to the limit.

They’re having a tough time with grocery bills. You’ve got major retailers that have engaged in squeezing people, squeezing their suppliers, squeezing the customers. The Premier knows that people are having a tough time staying afloat, and yet, today, we’re debating a bill that will protect the profits of Enbridge and raise gas bills that people will have to pay. It will take money out of people’s pockets. That’s the reality.

At the committee meeting a few weeks ago, we brought forward a number of amendments to protect people from higher bills, and I want to thank Unifor for suggesting two very useful amendments that would help reduce people’s Enbridge bills, one of which was to set up a system for monitoring and preventing leakages of natural gas from the system.

Let’s face it: Having gas leaks is bad in terms of safety, it’s bad in terms of people’s health, but it’s also bad in terms of the bills that people pay, because all of the customers are charged for the total cost of the gas coming through the system. Enbridge wants people to burn as much as they can: The more they burn, the more money is made. If the gas leaks into the atmosphere, well, hey, that’s just another form of consumption.

So did the government support that amendment which would be good for the environment, for health and for people’s bills? No, they did not.

Unifor also asked for action on the contracting out of utility functions. I raise this because a little more than two decades ago, there was a landmark hearing at the Ontario Energy Board about how Enbridge was hiving off parts of its operations to become what one would call a “virtual utility.” The ability to actually regulate the utility and control the costs they were taking out of people’s pockets was dramatically reduced when they contract out. In fact, it was alleged at the time that Enbridge was contracting out work—both direct maintenance and administration—to companies that they, in turn, controlled but which were outside the regulatory framework; in other words, there was no price control on them, which is why a regulator is there.

That was a good amendment, one put forward by Unifor which would protect customers from being gouged. No one will be surprised to know the government voted that down.

Now, we brought forward another amendment, and I want to thank Environmental Defence and Stand.earth for their suggestions for protecting customers from higher bills and that Enbridge pay for their own expansions. Pretty straightforward. Enbridge’s consultants know that there is a time limit to the gas distribution system in Ontario and across North America, and if the system starts phasing out more quickly—and it’s headed in that direction—the remaining customers get stuck with higher bills.

The amendment was to ensure that Enbridge, its investors, paid those extra costs, not the customers. No one in this room will be surprised to learn the government voted it down.

This bill is about making customers pay more, it’s about Enbridge getting richer, and when we actually get into the details of the bill in committee with amendments that would protect customers, they were refused by the government. It is focused on making sure Enbridge makes as much money as it possibly can.

I’m going to go back a bit to the decision by the OEB, the Ontario Energy Board, the regulator responsible for protecting customers from utilities.

Just before Christmas, the Ontario Energy Board announced the decision that would make Enbridge Gas responsible for the cost of expanding its gas system and protect almost four million customers from hundreds of millions of dollars in higher heating bills. Actually, I’m understating—we’re talking billions.

This is a very important point: Enbridge has investors. It has cash flow. If it wanted to put money into those new connections and collect from those new customers over 40 years, they could do that; no problem. They don’t have to take the money out of your pocket. They don’t have to take the money out of the pockets of the constituents that you represent. They could take it out of their own cash, but instead, they want it to come from existing gas customers.

I should say—again, I refer back to that 2002 decision by the Ontario Energy Board: They noted a pipeline Enbridge had been built that was uneconomic, one that actually drained money out of existing customers, and they said, “No, you can’t take that money from customers. The shareholders have to pay for that.” This is not unprecedented.

If Enbridge wants to put money in, they can put their shareholder money in and see if it comes back. But no, they treat customers like an ATM. They get permission to go to the machine, hit the button and take the money out of your pockets. That’s what’s going on.

The Ontario Energy Board, whose job is to protect customers from gouging, whose job is to protect customers from being taken advantage of, said, “No, we’re not going to support the increase that you’re asking for, billions of dollars for expansion of the system. It’s going to cost $300 to $600 per customer over the next four years.” They said, “Enbridge, it’s your expense. You pay. It’s yours”—entirely legit and something that’s been done before. The very next day in December, the minister announced that this government would be taking steps to reverse the decision of the Ontario Energy Board, the regulator they put in place.

Now I have to say, for those who have been around for a while, I used to refer to the Ontario Energy Board under the Liberals as glove puppets, as Muppets, and I think I was accurate, because I watched the performance. Those on the other side who were upset at many of the decisions made by the Liberals should be well aware that the Liberals skirted around the OEB. The OEB was there for a lot of show and display, but when it came to the fundamental questions, the Liberals said, “Well, very nice to have you, glad you enjoy your pay, but we’re going to make this decision. You’re not going to be part of it.”

So when this regulator actually stood up and said, “Hey, we’re going to follow our mandate and protect the customers of Enbridge,” I was astounded. They actually did their job. They had read their mandate. They listened to the evidence that was presented to them over a year—thousands of pages of evidence—and they said, “Damn, we’ve got to protect people.”

Of course, the party that used to attack the OEB for not standing up for customers realized that and said to themselves, “Boy, if this decision is allowed to go forward, then we’ve got Enbridge—a big company, very profitable—going to be very cranky with us.” That’s why we have this bill before us today. Enbridge and the government came together very quickly to protect Enbridge—within hours—and give the minister talking points, and obediently, the minister used those talking points and does to this day.

But, Speaker, wait; there’s more. Not only did the government decide right then to protect Enbridge, but they wrote the law to ensure that the regulator would no longer actually regulate. The bill restructures things so any well-connected lobbyist or team of lobbyists can get around the regulator. What kind of heaven have they created for utilities who want to pillage the public? The regulator, the Ontario Energy Board, is now there in many ways as they were for the Liberals: for display and not for protection of consumers. It’s an expensive decoration. It disguises where real decisions are made about your hydro and gas bills.

This is straight out of this government’s greenbelt playbook: decisions made in backrooms to protect powerful private utilities; not to protect you, not protect the Enbridge customers who are out there, not to protect the constituents who you represent, but to protect Enbridge.

The Premier is going to raise your gas bill. When you get the bill in the mail later this year with a notice saying, “We’ve got an increase,” I think you should remember who made sure that that happened. Make sure you remember who put their thumb on the scale to ensure that the price is higher. This Premier has acted and is acting to protect the very wealthy Enbridge and stick you and your family with the bill.

Not only is this decision that was protecting gas consumers going up in smoke, but future decisions will be in trouble. There were a few people who had comments. The Toronto Atmospheric Fund made a presentation. What was interesting to me was that typically they’re much more focused on environmental and climate issues, but in this presentation to us at committee their focus was on the reality of ending effective regulation. They wrote:

“We have reservations regarding the extent of the new ministerial authority proposed in section 96.2. As noted above, the OEB has a mandate to protect ... consumers’ interests”—I noted that before; that’s their job. That’s what they did—“while facilitating rational expansion of gas infrastructure....

“The OEB does this using a well-regarded transparent and evidence-based process in which all stakeholders are invited to participate, introduce evidence and challenge evidence introduced by other parties. This quasi-judicial standard of decision-making provides a safeguard, ensuring balance and alignment with goals of keeping energy costs down and expanding the energy system.

“Proposed section 96.2”—which is in the bill that’s before us—“permanently supersedes this transparent, evidence-based process with unrestricted ministerial authority to decide which gas infrastructure projects are in the public interest and who should bear the cost of the projects. Unlike the OEB, there is no obligation for the minister to consult stakeholders and transparently weigh evidence in an open process before issuing directives. This change also encourages project proponents to focus efforts on ministerial advocacy instead of putting forward rationale arguments and credible evidence in OEB applications and proceedings.”

What they’re saying is that the regulator is fully and truly just The Muppet Show; that everyone who can afford a lobbyist goes around that Muppet, goes to the minister, makes their pitch and, if they’ve been to a wedding or a stag, probably is successful.

Similarly, the Society of United Professionals, which represents the actual OEB staff, the Ontario Energy Board staff, spoke about the end of regulatory independence and they talked about the impact on investors coming to Ontario of the Muppet-ization of this regulator:

“At the heart of the society’s opposition to the proposed Bill 165 is the removal of regulatory independence from the OEB. Publicly traded companies that rely on regulated rates, and credit-rating agencies that determine credit quality in the province’s utility sector, need to trust that the regulator maintains its independence and does not become a political arm of the government.”

In a recent analysis, Standard and Poor’s Global, the bond-rating agency, laid out the four pillars of Ontario’s natural gas and electricity regulatory environment. They are regulatory stability, tariff-setting procedures, financial stability and regulatory independence. They further state that they “believe the Ontarian regulatory framework is the most credit-supportive kind, benefiting all key stakeholders.” However, they warn their assessment of the province’s regulatory framework could change if there was “a loss of regulatory independence or instances of political interference in the framework.”

Well, I’ll tell you right now, if you’re a credit-rating agency and someone is applying to invest in energy infrastructure in Ontario, and you know that you no longer actually have an independent regulator—that you actually just have a lobby machine that determines energy decisions based on who is most effective at getting to a minister—then you have an impact on the credit rating of investments made in this province. That is an argument that I would have thought would work on the government, because the argument was made in front of government members in committee, but it was ignored.

Also interesting were the words of the Industrial Gas Users Association—so you’re talking big employers in Ontario, major industries who use a lot of gas. They said there were two unintended consequences of the bill. I think they were overly generous, because I think they were entirely intended, but they said “unintended,” I think because they’re polite. They said that selective approvals—the ability to approve projects by going around the regulator—would push up costs for industry in Ontario; that uneconomic, nonviable projects would be subsidized by the industries that we depend on right now to employ tens of thousands of people.

So the big industries that this government talks about all the time didn’t like this. You should understand that they were not fans of ending regulation in Ontario. They said that the independent regulator has been useful in keeping costs down, but what we’re seeing now is going to drive costs up.

They also said they couldn’t understand why procedural fairness was something that was ruled out by the bill. I didn’t get into that, but there actually are rules in Ontario that governments and bodies should follow to ensure that decisions are made on a fair basis. Those were wiped out in this bill when it comes to energy regulation. They suggested that it was not a good thing to have that happen.

So, the Premier is planning to raise your gas bills this year, and in future remove any protection that Ontarians may have from lobbyists reshaping energy policy in backrooms. Man, I feel like I’m back in Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario. It is amazing. For anyone who was here for the gas plant scandal—

Interjection.

Speaker, as you and other members of the House are well aware, this government wants people to pay more to Enbridge. They want to increase their gas bills.

In December, the Ontario Energy Board, the body that regulates utilities in this province, decided that consumers needed to be protected; that they should not be subsidizing Enbridge’s expansion; that, in fact, those customers needed to be protected today and for decades to come.

Unfortunately, the government has decided that instead of protecting consumers, they will be protecting Enbridge.

This morning, in committee, we debated amendments to Bill 165. Every amendment meant to protect consumers, to protect them from higher prices, was defeated by the government. The government is determined to ensure that, at the price of consumers, Enbridge’s investors will be protected down the line. This is not a defensible position on the part of the government, not one that will be appreciated by consumers when they get their gas bills in the next few months, and one that, over the decades to come, will mean much higher bills than people otherwise would have been paying.

The government needs to reverse course. They need to reject this bill that they brought forward.

“Whereas tenants are finding it difficult to pay constantly rising rents; and

“Whereas consecutive Conservative and Liberal governments sat idle, while housing costs spiralled out of control, speculators made fortunes, and families had to put their hopes on hold;

“Whereas every Ontarian should have access to safe, affordable housing, whether a family wants to rent or own; live in a house, an apartment, a condominium or a co-op, they should have affordable options;

“We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to immediately prioritize the repair of Ontario’s social housing stock, commit to building new affordable homes, crack down on housing speculators, and make rentals more affordable through real rent controls and updated legislation.”

Speaker, I agree with this petition. I’ve signed it, and I’ll give to the page Bhavneet.

“Whereas Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones say they’re planning to privatize parts of health care;

“Whereas privatization will bleed nurses, doctors and PSWs out of our public hospitals, making the health care crisis worse;

“Whereas privatization always ends with patients getting a bill;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to immediately stop all plans to further privatize Ontario’s health care system, and fix the crisis in health care by:...

“—licensing tens of thousands of internationally educated nurses and other health care professionals already in Ontario, who wait years and pay thousands to have their credentials certified;”

—bring in “10 employer-paid sick days;

“—making education and training free or low-cost for nurses, doctors and other health care professionals;

“—incentivizing doctors and nurses to choose to live and work in northern Ontario;

“—funding hospitals to have enough nurses on every shift, on every ward.”

I agree with this petition. I have signed it and I give to it page Korel to submit.

Speaker, just to be totally clear, Premier Ford wants to raise your gas bill. That’s what this is about. Premier Ford wants you to pay more month after month, year after year. That’s what this is about. He has decided to protect higher profits for Enbridge by taking more money out of your pocket and the pockets of millions of others across this province. He’s protecting his buddies at Enbridge, and he’s sticking you and all the other customers of Enbridge with the bill, and that bill is going to be about $300 per customer over the next four years.

So if you think you should pay more on your gas bill, you should support the minister. And if you think you shouldn’t be stuck with that bill, if you think Enbridge should be the body that actually coughs up the few billion dollars that are going to be necessary, then you should oppose this bill that’s been brought forward.

I don’t know how to make it any plainer. I don’t know how to make it any plainer: He wants to raise your gas bill; he wants you to pay more so that Enbridge makes more money. That is what this is about. He wants to reverse the decision the Ontario Energy Board made in December to protect you from higher gas bills.

Now, it’s the job of the Ontario Energy Board, the regulator, to look out for consumer interests when energy companies apply to raise their rates. That’s their job. That’s their mandate. They are told, “Look out for consumers. Look out for the public. Make sure they aren’t gouged, they aren’t ripped off, they aren’t pillaged, they aren’t silently stolen from. Look after those customers. Whether they’re electrical utilities or gas utilities, protect the customers.” And that’s what they did. They did their job.

And now, the government is horrified that people are going to be protected from higher gas bills. They’re horrified that Enbridge will not continue to make the crushingly huge profits that they have been making, and they want to reverse that.

Enbridge is a multi-billion-dollar company. And frankly, there’s a bigger Enbridge that runs gas transmission lines across North America and there’s the smaller multi-billion-dollar corporation here in Ontario—not exactly on the edge of poverty; companies that have a few bucks available if they wanted to actually help customers. That isn’t what we’re dealing with here. What we’re dealing with here is a company that wants to squeeze every last penny out of you.

This bill will strip you of protection from Enbridge’s attempts to gouge customers across this province. The minister doesn’t have to do that. The Premier doesn’t have to do that. The Premier could protect you, could protect your family and protect families across this province. He knows that people are having a tough time. We have those debates, those discussions, here in the Legislature all the time. People are pushed hard. They’ve got rising rents. This government won’t protect them from rising rents. They’re having a tough time with mortgages. They’re having a tough time with grocery bills. You’ve got major retailers that have been engaged in squeezing people, squeezing their suppliers, squeezing the customers. He knows that people are having a tough time staying afloat, and yet—and yet—today what we’re doing is debating a bill that would protect the profits of Enbridge and raise the gas bills that people have to pay. It will take money out of people’s pockets. That’s the reality.

I have to say this: I’m saying that I’m impressed, and not in a good way, that the minister kept a straight face while he made that speech. That was extraordinary. I am impressed—not in a good way, but I am impressed.

Let’s go back a little bit. Just before Christmas, the Ontario Energy Board announced a decision that would make Enbridge Gas responsible for the cost of expanding its gas system and protect almost four million customers from hundreds of millions of dollars in higher heating bills. This is a very important point. Enbridge has investors; it has cash flow. If it wanted to put the money into those new connections and collect from those customers over 40 years, they could do that. They don’t have to take the money out of your pocket or your pocket or my pocket. They could do it out of their own cash—no sweat. But, instead, they wanted it to come from the existing gas customers. The Ontario Energy Board, whose job is to protect customers from gouging, whose job is to protect customers from being taken advantage of, said, “No, we’re not going to support this increase that’s going to cost $300 per customer over the next four years. We’re going to say, ‘Enbridge, it’s yours. It’s yours.’” And the very next day, the minister announced that they—this government—would be taking steps to reverse the decision of the Ontario Energy Board, the regulator that they put in place.

Now, I have to say, for those who are around for a while, I used to refer to the Ontario Energy Board under the Liberals as the glove puppets. You had the Minister of Energy’s hand there stuck up an energy board regulator and saying whatever the minister needed to have said. I was astounded that this regulator, this board, actually stood up for customers, stood up for consumers—astounding. They actually did their job. They read their mandate. They listened to the evidence and they said, “Damn, we gotta protect people.” Of course, this party that used to attack the OEB for not standing up for customers realizes that, “Boy, if they stand up for customers there are going to be some pretty heavy-duty private interests that are going to be really cranky.” So that’s why we have this bill before us today.

Now I want to go back a bit further. There’s a subsidy that gas customers do not even know they’re funding. If you talk to most people, they look at their gas bill and they see “gas” and then they see “distribution,” the cost of getting it through the pipes to their house. They don’t know that part of those rates is paying the cost of expanding the system. They think, “No, I just want to pay for the pipe that comes to my house. Why do I have to pay for these investments that you’re making that you’re going to make money off of?” That isn’t where their heads are at. I tried this out on my nephew at Christmastime. I said, “Do you know you’re subsidizing these new expansions?” He was outraged. He said, “Why? I just want to pay for my gas bill. I just want heat, that’s all. They want to expand, they can pay for it.”

I have to say, the independent energy regulator decided to put a stop to this subsidy because it raises energy bills for existing gas customers and for new homebuyers. This is not a wonderful gift for them. It sets them up for higher costs in the years to come and it also increases financial risks for the whole of the gas system.

Ending the subsidy would save gas customers over a billion dollars over the next four years in avoided pipeline subsidy costs. That comes to about $300 per customer. There are about four million customers on the system. Of course, that billion dollars doesn’t include the interest and the profit payments that go to Enbridge. So I’m talking the bare minimum, right? I’m just talking the minimum number that was cited by the Ontario Energy Board.

What ending the subsidy would do, aside from protecting existing customers from being gouged, is that it would encourage developers to install electric heat pumps in new homes instead of gas, which would provide cheaper heating and cooling for new homebuyers. And that is based on a variety of studies showing the reality of comparing the cost of capital and operating for gas-centred systems with capital and operating for heat pump systems.

So ending that subsidy would be a win, a win, a win and a win. It would lower energy bills for existing customers—wildly popular—and lower energy bills for new homeowners because they would be getting a less expensive system. It would lower carbon emissions—and actually, I think that matters. And it would avoid even more costs down the road to convert away from fossil fuel heating in the houses that were built with heat pumps from the start.

But there is a loser in all this. I have to be clear. There is a loser: Enbridge Gas. They would lose a lot of money. Frankly, they can afford it. They’re not exactly on the ropes. They’re doing well. I would say that if they are not making super gazillions of profits, but just billions in profits, they can probably survive, but many, many tenants and homeowners are having a tough time surviving. So our task, I believe, is to protect those tenants, those homeowners and not protect these multi-billion-dollar, multinational corporations.

Now, Enbridge is lobbying hard to stop that decision, to overturn that decision, and it has launched two challenges. Its court challenge boldly complains that the decision will mean “Enbridge Gas has no right or ability to invest and earn a return on capital for new customer connections.” In other words, it’s going to reduce their profits. Actually, I don’t think the OEB said you couldn’t invest; you just couldn’t invest with money provided by your existing customers. If their investors wanted to put money in, hey, there’s no barrier to doing that. They could go ahead. Now, there are questions they would ask, and frankly, the consultants who they quote in their submissions to the Ontario Energy Board raised big red flags about the potential for a lack of return in the future on those investments.

Minister Smith is trying to pass this legislation, the bill before us, to overturn that decision. The government of Ontario has decided to stand with Enbridge and its lobbyists, using the argument that change will reduce housing supply and affordability. But developers can just forgo gas and install heat pumps instead. If they have a customer who really wants gas, they can do that, but everyone gets an electrical connection in any event. So why wouldn’t you take the opportunity to install an electric heat pump and forgo that extra cost of putting in gas? And even if you didn’t want to go there, why do people around this province have to subsidize this? Why do people in Kingston or Ottawa, Hamilton, London, Windsor have to pony up an extra 300 bucks over the next four years to subsidize this multi-billion-dollar corporation?

You don’t have to take my word about the fact that this is not going to affect the cost of housing. I’m glad I went to public school in Ontario. It gave me at least one skill: I can read; sometimes I can do math—although people challenge me.

Ian Mondrow is a partner at the law firm Gowling WLG, practising in the area of energy regulation policy, and he wrote an op-ed that was published in the Globe and Mail. He can see that leaving the regulator’s decision in place would protect current gas customers and new home owners. Now, this is not the NDP research department—and, frankly, you should know that that is an excellent department. I’m just saying that they’re not ideologically ours; Gowling is not known as an NDP firm. But I’m going to quote the op-ed from this lawyer who specializes in energy regulation policy:

“While including gas connection costs to developers up front would marginally increase the cost of a new house, an offsetting rate credit recognizing the upfront payment would lower ongoing gas rates, resulting in a wash for homebuyers. The other choice would be to forego gas servicing in favour of electric heat pumps, thus lowering the operating costs of the house—a win for homebuyers.” The member from Perth–Wellington was talking about new home buyers. Well, you’ve got someone who specializes in energy policy saying this would be better for new home buyers. “Either choice would reduce Enbridge capital costs, and potential stranded assets, in the range of $1 billion over the proposed five-year gas rate plan period, significantly reducing delivery rates and customer risk.”

Two associate professors, Brandon Schaufele and Adam Fremeth of the Ivey Business School, wrote a post about this as well: “The government’s decision to override the OEB should have virtually no effect on affordable housing in the province.”

So if this bill passes, this ain’t going to make housing any cheaper. It is not going to be to the advantage of homebuyers. In other words, the government’s action will make you pay more and will not help new homebuyers, but it will mean higher rates for your gas bills. The Premier wants you to pay more. The Premier wants to raise your gas bill. Don’t get confused. Be very clear and plain about this. The Premier wants you to pay more.

Now, gas is no longer the cheapest heating source. Investing in gas pipelines for heating is financially foolish because they will become obsolete and a massive cost to all current and future customers as we stop burning gas to heat our homes and other buildings. Even the minister was talking about electrification of home heating. He knows it’s coming. What that means, over the next few decades, is that fewer and fewer people will be burning gas, and the people who leave the system will not have to carry the burden of the cost of those pipes that are in the ground, but the ones who stay will be stuck with it. There are cheaper alternatives to what’s been before us.

The OEB recognized that, like rotary dial phones, like Blockbuster Video, natural gas furnaces are coming to the end of their time—not tomorrow, not in 2025, but over the next 20 years, cheaper alternatives such as home heat pumps are undermining Enbridge’s market for home heating. The minister said exactly that. We’re going to be electrifying our homes. So the OEB ruled that Enbridge can’t spread the cost of hooking up new homes over decades or charge it to current gas customers like you, like the people who are watching this, like the people in this room who actually are still Enbridge customers. They’re going to be stuck with this cost. That’s what the Premier wants to do. He wants to increase your gas bill. The OEB said that Enbridge or new home developers have to take the risk, not new home buyers or current Enbridge customers. It recognizes that this would likely mean many more people installing the cheaper heat pumps to provide heating.

It was interesting to me that, again, the minister said he’s got a heat pump. He said when it gets really cold, the electric furnace backup in the installation comes on. Fair enough. I’ve got a heat pump at home. I’ve never been cold; I’m assuming the backup comes on when it gets really cold. But he didn’t say he was freezing in the dark. He said the system worked. If he had been freezing in the dark, believe me, all of you would have heard it. You would have heard the descriptions of the frozen bowl of water for the cat in the kitchen. You would have heard about the need to bundle up the kids and whisk them off to a hotel somewhere. No, he’s totally comfortable at home because he’s got the backup right there. Most of the time, the heat pump—probably all the time because the newer heat pumps are good down to minus 30—they’re totally fine in our climate.

I’m going to go back to Ian Mondrow about the question of how we can actually deal with the issues before us. Because passing legislation to reinstate a subsidy that’s completely out of step and risks financial disaster down the road doesn’t make sense.

The minister, in his statement, in his speech, said that the decision of the OEB would increase the cost of energy, increase the cost of a new home, and the facts do not support that claim. When you look for those facts, when you round them up, when you put them together and you compare them to the minister’s statement, they are not related; they’re not distant cousins. There is no blood relation between the facts and the minister’s statement. It’s just not there.

I’m going to go back to the energy-regulator lawyer from Gowling, Ian Mondrow, who had this to say about the claim by the minister. He writes in a more formal style than me but I think he’s quite good: “Early the following day after the release of the OEB decision, Ontario’s Minister of Energy released a statement expressing that he was ‘extremely disappointed’ with the OEB’s decision.... The minister asserted that the OEB’s determination on this point ... ‘could lead to tens of thousands of dollars added to the cost of building new homes, and ... would slow or halt the construction of new homes, including affordable housing.’” Well, good God. That’s a scary thought.

The lawyer, Ian Mondrow, goes on: “If those facts were true”—and I like the “if”—“then the minister could well have a legitimate and immediate housing policy concern. The facts as determined in the OEB’s decision do not, however, support a ‘tens of thousands of dollars’ increase in home costs, and it does not appear that the decision will in fact ‘slow or halt the construction of new homes.’ The conclusions expressed in the minister’s statement”—and, frankly, his speech today—“are inconsistent with the facts relied on, and determinations made, by the OEB’s three-member expert panel of commissioners as a result of the comprehensive hearing process undertaken.”

I want to say a few other things about the area of charges. I’m speaking to you gas customers who are going to get stuck with a higher bill if this legislation passes. One is that claim that gas heating is the cheapest option. Numerous studies now show that, when you compare the combined costs of equipment and energy, heat pumps provide cheaper heating than gas heating. Just look at putting in a heat pump or putting in a furnace or an air conditioner—those capital costs and then the cost over the lifetime, it’s cheaper to go with a heat pump.

In fact—and the minister referenced this in his speech—Enbridge, which keeps spreading the claim about gas being cheaper, is now facing an investigation and hearing at the Competition Bureau for false advertising.

Speaker, it came out just the other day that this government is paying substantial bonuses to private clinics for surgery that is done in public hospitals. It was revealed that the payments to the Don Mills Surgical Unit, part of the Clearpoint Health Network—it is getting paid almost double the amount that public hospitals get paid for cataract surgery, double the amount for knee surgery.

This government is engaged in a straightforward project of privatizing our health care system. That project is one which will result in less medical care for people; which will result, ultimately, in people being able to pay for their surgery and health care if they have the money and having to go without if they don’t. It is a disastrous course of action.

I call on the government to end the privatization of our health care system, to stop paying bonuses to private clinics, and to actually protect the health care of the people of this province.

Well, that was an interesting dodge.

Let’s try it again. The Premier has promised private gas plant companies that Ontario ratepayers will keep paying for the new gas plants even after they are shut down. The gas plant contracts will run to 2040, but those plants will be shut down long before then under federal law.

We already had one gas plant scandal under the Liberals. And it looks like the PC government is determined to do exactly the same thing.

How much will Ontario ratepayers be forced to pay for new gas plant contracts after these plants have been shut down?