Tom Adams

April 17, 2002

All across Canada, big business is fighting to bolster the provincial Hydro monopolies, and the subsidized rates big business gets at your expense.

In British Columbia, big business – especially the major polluters – are livid at the new government’s proposal for market pricing. The corporate opponents of a modern power system include many of B.C.’s largest resource companies, including Teck Cominco, Scott Paper, Canadian Forest Products and the corporate lobbies, the Mining Association of British Columbia and the Council of Forest Industries.

In Ontario, the steel giant, Dofasco, is leading the big business push to keep parts of the old Ontario Hydro system in place. Dofasco, which is well-connected politically, wants a power system that continues to subsidize large, politically connected consumers.

In Quebec, Alcan, Alouette and Alcoa, some of the largest electricity consumers in the world, have just won 25-year contracts to buy massive amounts of power at below market value along with interest free loans to build metal smelters where the electricity will be used. These latest handouts to electricity guzzlers will provide the justification to build more hydro dams in Quebec’s fragile North.

The story is similar in other provinces, too. The multinationals know that Energy Probe’s plan to break up the Hydro monopolies and introduce genuine competition threatens their cozy relationship with the Hydro companies. Cheap energy at any price that is what multinationals want. To prevent competition in power, they’re prepared to let the economy suffer, and the environment be devastated.

Since 1989, when the United Kingdom adopted the Energy Probe electricity-restructuring model, the U.K. has built no new coal plants, no new oil plants and no new nuclear plants. Just the opposite. The U.K. shut down dozens of coal, oil and nuclear plants while simultaneously converting to high-efficiency natural gas plants and some renewable forms of energy – precisely what we and other environmentalists have long argued made most economic sense. What happened to rates in the U.K.? They immediately dropped for small businesses and residential customers, and eventually dropped for big business as well. While rates in most of Canada are set to climb under the continuing Hydro system, in England residential customers now pay, on average, 32 per cent less than they did a decade ago!

If you believe the environment must be protected, and that all customers – not just those with political pull – deserve fair rates, please support Energy Probe with a generous donation. We’ll use it to protect the pocketbooks of hardworking Canadians who don’t want to overpay for their Hydro so that corporations can get a free ride at the environment’s expense.