John Spears
Toronto Star
February 27, 2001

A frequent critic of the Ontario government’s energy policies has failed to win reappointment as a director of a key agency set up to run the province’s new electricity market.

Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe, has not been reappointed to the board of the Independent Electricity Market Operator (IMO). He was the only one of six directors not reappointed to the IMO when their terms came up for renewal. The IMO has 16 directors in total.

The agency has been set up to run Ontario’s new competitive electricity market, which is not expected to open before the end of the year.

Adams had served on a committee that drew up the basic design for the province’s new electricity market before his appointment to the IMO.

"He helped bridge the gap between that process and the start-up of the IMO, and did that ably,” said Mike Krizanc, a spokesperson for Energy Minister Jim Wilson. “But they’re not positions for life."

He wouldn’t say why the minister dropped Adams, who was replaced by Carol Perry, chief executive of Maxxcap Corporate Finance Inc., a financial services advisory firm.

“It’s sort of like a personnel issue,” Krizanc said. “It’s not something we would discuss in any kind of detail.”

“The sequence was that I wrote to the minister recommending the reappointment of everyone whose term was expiring, including Mr. Adams,” said James Baillie, IMO chair in explaining the process.

“He then said to me: `To help me consider this list I’d like to have a couple of additional people who’d be qualified.’ We gave him a couple of names of people who would be credible. Carol Perry was one of those names, and, in his wisdom, he appointed her instead of Tom.”

It was “essentially a ministerial decision, as it should be because he’s the shareholder,” Baillie said.

Adams supported opening the electricity market to competition. But he criticized Queen’s Park when he thought it had made a wrong move by rolling back rate increases sought by municipal utilities, saying the rollback masked the true impact of the government’s policies. He had also said government actions damaged the Ontario Energy Board’s independence.

Adams said he had wanted to be reappointed. “I took the independence of the IMO very seriously and made comments that in some cases I knew might cause discomfort in some quarters,” Adams said. “But they were comments I think the public deserved to know.

“When I offered my name for reappointment, I knew in some sense it was a test of how far the government was going to allow the IMO to be independent.”