Marlene Habib/Canadian Press
Toronto Star
December 18, 2002

Don’t spend your hydro rebate cheque before you receive it.

Based on calls to some hydro utilities, there’s a lot of consumer confusion about who’s getting a $75 rebate cheque and who’s not as a result of Ontario government legislation that also froze hydro prices.

In fact, Toronto Hydro, which supplies about one-quarter of the province’s electricity to businesses and residents, took out ads this week to clarify who can expect rebates and why.

"Our call centre was getting a number of calls, so we wanted to put an ad out to clarify," Laurie McFadden, a spokeswoman for Toronto Hydro, said yesterday about the ad in such publications as Toronto Metro, Toronto’s subway newspaper.

Consumers like Susan Charness said that until she read the ad, she was expecting the $75 from Toronto Hydro to show up in her mailbox.

"I didn’t know who’s supposed to get (the rebate), but I assumed I was going to get it because everything I heard made me think that," said Charness, who runs her own business out of her suburban Toronto home.

Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe, an industry watchdog, said the public is "legitimately confused" by the province’s hydro-kickback plan because there’s a "fundamental lack of clarity from the government as to what is going on. They don’t know who’s going to pay for these rebates or worked out the detail about how they’re going to be administered. It’s very difficult for the people who are running the power system to figure out what’s going on, so how do ordinary customers figure it out?"

Yesterday, Dan Miles, aide to Energy Minister John Baird, said it’s up to local utilities to administer the rebates and ensure they’re sent out by Dec. 31, either by mail as separate cheques or hand delivered.

Miles said "pockets of the province" – including Toronto, Chatham and Middlesex-County – consistently paid 4.3 cents a kilowatt hour under standard-supply-rate billing, so consumers shouldn’t expect a rebate.

The Toronto Hydro ads explain that whether you get a rebate comes down to whether or not your household or business has signed on with an independent retailer who signs consumers to fixed-rate plans over a period of years.