Tom Adams
Eye magazine
April 12, 2001

Letters to the Editor

Judging from his track record of extending secret subsidies to industrial power guzzlers, using Cabinet orders to undermine the independence of our energy regulator, and exempting Crown-owned electricity corporations from Ontario’s Freedom of Information Act, Mike Harris is intent on keeping the public in the dark about key aspects of his electricity restructuring.

However, faults in Ontario’s ill-implemented electricity restructuring do not prove that a return to the old Hydro would solve the problems the old Hydro created, including lack of transparency, or that competition and privatization necessarily decrease public access to information.

Public ownership does not equal public disclosure. For example, in 1993 the NDP began a trend of exempting the old Hydro from rate reviews by the Ontario Energy Board, a move designed to keep industrial rate subsidies secret. Thorough disclosure in the days of the old Hydro was rare and often required heroic effort by journalists or environmental groups.

Experience elsewhere proves that markets can lead to more transparency. For all its warts, Alberta’s electricity restructuring has vastly increased public access to electricity sector information. Water privatization in the U.K. has also contributed to great improvements in disclosure. David Kinnersley, a former senior British civil servant, in his book Coming Clean: The Politics of Water and the Environment, points out that from 1951-1985 "Whitehall insisted that details of authorized effluent discharges made by businesses and local councils should be concealed from public knowledge" whereas today, "this concealment is ended; the details are in the open on public registers that anyone can study."

Tom Adams
Executive Director, Energy Probe