No. 147, Public Utilities Act (amended) - 3rd Reading

CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : I'm happy to rise and speak to this bill one last time. We will be supporting this bill.

We're pleased to see, as has now been spoken about by the minister and by my colleague, the amendment to include the Farmers' Markets of Nova Scotia in the group of community and grassroots organizations that are not charged commercial rates.

I think it's important to note on that point that when we spoke with that organization, its executive director, Justin Cantafio, made a very compelling plea which we echoed here in the House: to follow up this amendment with emergency support for markets that are on the brink of closure.

I urge the minister to take this under advisement and other ministers who would have a hand in this file. It sounds like we are in agreement in this House on the importance of local food and growing our local food supply, and farmers' markets are the current hub for that. I would urge the government to do everything they can to continue that support, but we're very glad to see that move.

Not surprisingly, our support is tinged with a fair amount of disappointment that none of the amendments that we put forward - all of which I think were quite common sense - were accepted.

We suggested an amendment that would have strengthened the UARB's mandate to align it with EGCCRA. To us, that would have been a common sense friendly amendment. The government has made much of passing the Environmental Goals and Climate Change Reduction Act; they are proud of it, rightly. We supported it. We are perplexed that the minister wouldn't act to make the mandate of the UARB and their regulatory system more closely aligned with that Act.

They also voted down an amendment to require the creation of a sustainability advocate. We have a consumer advocate. There are some in this House who have said that what young people wake up in the night about is the debt that future generations may be facing. I would suggest that there are more young people who wake up in the middle of the night wondering if they're going to have a world to live in that looks anything like the one that their parents did.

I think as important as thinking about consumers - and we do have a consumer advocate, which is good - we don't have a sustainability advocate. We don't have someone there making sure that our energy system is responsible to future generations. We think that's very important.

We also put forward an amendment that would have removed the $1 million per year cap on penalties for Nova Scotia Power when they fail performance standards. We've discussed at length in this House just how profitable Nova Scotia Power and Emera are, and yet there is a $1 million cap on the contravention of any penalties. You can put as many penalties or performance indicators as you want, but if the company isn't concerned about breaching them based on a financial penalty, it doesn't really matter.

In fact, as I tabled earlier in this House, the Premier himself argued when he was in Opposition that this million-dollar cap would essentially mean that the bill was toothless. We think there was an opportunity to change that here, to show that the minister meant business, so to speak, with these new performance indicators, but that opportunity was missed.

Last, we put forward an amendment that would have removed the clause in the legislation that prevents Nova Scotia Power from creating a program to assist low-income Nova Scotians who struggle to pay their power bills.

I want to pause on this for a moment because it's really important. This was one of two bills that was introduced under the headline of a response to the general rate application from Nova Scotia Power helping to deal with rates. This amendment would have done that. Without this amendment, this bill does not do that. It does not do anything to impact the rates that Nova Scotians pay and it especially doesn't do anything to remove the barrier, which has been upheld by the courts, that prevents the UARB in fact from addressing the needs of low-income energy users, which is any low-income person because you can't avoid using energy here in Nova Scotia or in most other places.

We've failed to make this change. Our amendment did not require this change. It didn't require any specific change at all. All it did, and we had some very compelling presentations about this at Law Amendments Committee, was to remove the barrier to creating this kind of a program. We respect the independence and the expertise of the UARB. We also recognize that in this House, in this province, our leverage over our energy rates is through the way in which the UARB is regulated. This, in particular - Section 67 of this Act - prevents the UARB from addressing the disproportionate burden of energy poverty on low-income Nova Scotians.

We are very disappointed that this was not passed. It would have been a very significant step forward. It would have cost the government nothing. I think this is a really important point. There are a lot of times that a government won't want to take legislation because there are unintended consequences, there are costs. We recognize that. There's Finance and Treasury Board, there's a budgeting process, of course. This doesn't fall into that category. This is a regulatory change. This just says that we are going to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak, and we are going to actually address the needs of Nova Scotians. We're going to actually address the rates. We're going to actually address energy poverty. The government missed an opportunity to do that here.

As I said before, we welcome the move to expand and improve performance standards, but it's actually unclear what impact much of the changed wording in this bill would have, so our amendment to have a sustainability advocate was to put some teeth in the idea that actually this performance standard would be met, that there would be some expertise, some advocacy, to help the UARB to meet that new performance standard.

Our amendment to Section 67 about low-income energy users - it says the word "low-income" in the new performance standards, but we already know that the UARB is unable to address their needs, so I'm not really sure what that language actually means.

This Act does nothing for Nova Scotians facing an increase of 10 per cent on their energy bills in just over two years. The government could have at the very least, with these amendments, removed the cap on penalties for Nova Scotia Power. It would have sent a signal to Nova Scotia Power that if they don't deliver on their current performance standards - and I don't need to reiterate to anyone in this Chamber the number of days that there are unplanned outages in this province because it is every day, Mr. Speaker. We don't have the stats for this year but the last time we had statistics, when the CBC ran a story, which has been tabled previously, it was every single day. It was yesterday we heard about unplanned outages, the day before, but clearly the performance standards we have now are not working.

In conclusion I will reiterate that while I support expanding and improving performance standards, we feel that this approach is insufficient. We've entered a new era of energy systems, and our old regulatory model is not working. I will continue to argue and advocate that we need a more robust form of performance-based regulation, one that ties Nova Scotia Power's profits to its performance on the goals that we set, goals on decarbonization, reducing power bills, increasing energy efficiency, and expanding community-generated power. We need an energy utility that works for us.

I will support this bill knowing that the conversations at the advisory table and in the public will very likely take us in that direction, but in the meantime, I urge the government to do more.