Ontarians Ought To Consider Boycotting Hydro One’s Billing Department To Stop Hydro Sell Off

A Commentary by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

What if Hydro One customers – however hundreds of thousands of us there are across Ontario – all stopped paying our hydro bills until the province’s Liberal government finally agreed to drop its crazy to privatize up to 60 per cent of the utility?

I am not sure how you would organize boycott on that scale. Maybe someone who knows how to use social media to rally large numbers of people could figure that out.

But something needs to be done to stop Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and her Liberals from moving forward with a privatization scheme you’d normally expect to come from a Conservative government tempered in the anti-government, free market ideology of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her most ardent Ontario disciple, Mike Harris.

As the reasoning behind this move to sell off 60 per cent of Hydro One (the electricity distribution half of the old Ontario Hydro) to private sector shareholders goes, Wynne government wants to do it to raise about $9 billion in fast money from the transaction that it can use to fund public transit and other infrastructure projects around the province.

That, along with repeated assurances from the government that the sell-off won’t result in even higher hydro rates for home and business owners, may be the reasoning, but what it looks like is a desperate move by a government that hasn’t got the guts to raise taxes to get some quick bucks.

It’s sort of like someone who feels forced to hock some of their worldly possessions to pay their bills.

Hum, what do we do now, sell all the silverware or grandpa’s gold watch. That’s where Wynne and company appear to be at.

And the history of privatizing public services in Ontario and elsewhere in the world hasn’t been a pretty one. In fact it has often proven very costly for consumers of those services.

Look no further than the Greater Toronto Area and the sell-off of to a private consortium of Highway 407 by Ontario’s Mike Harris government in the late 1990s. It was followed by skyrocketing toll hikes and continuous complaints by the highway’s users of flawed billing practices.

In England in the 1980s, after then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher sold off publicly owned water utilities in the country, the corporations that took them over raked in a fortune while investing so little in the operation and maintenance of the pipes and treatment system, that boiling water orders became the rule of the day for communities to prevent their residents from being exposed to potentially lethal fecal contamination. In a word, the sell-off proved to be a disaster and became one of a long list of reasons why a majority of British residents were finally glad to see the back of Margaret Thatcher.

Back to present times in Ontario, Wynne and her government look determined to move ahead with privatizing a big chunk of the province’s hydro transmission system even though poll after poll is now showing that a vast majority of Ontario residents oppose it, NDP and Tory critics in the legislature are speaking out almost daily against it and, according to some of the most recent reports, more than a third of the province’s municipal councils have expressed their objection to it.

Wynne’s Liberals also appear not to have the courage Alberta’s recently sworn-in Premier Rachel Notley has demonstrated with her stated plan to raise income taxes (which is at least a progressive tax based on an individual’s ability to pay) to obtain the revenue she needs to deliver essential serves in the province.

Nor doesWynne and company appear to have the will to do what British Columbia successfully did seven years ago and implement a carbon tax aimed at accomplishing two things – raising revenue for services and encourage individuals and businesses to do their part to shift away from activities that produce pollution that contributes to climate change.

One can almost understand why Wynne is afraid of mentioning any kind of tax. It is quite likely that even if the tax makes sense in theory, many Ontarians might react angrily as they are reminded that Wynne’s old boss – the former Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty – wasted large sums of our tax money cancelling the construction of gas-fired power plants for what appeared to be political reasons and squandered even more of our money on other wasteful enterprises.

So here we are with the Wynne government moving to privatize a major piece of a time-honoured public asset, leaving us facing the possibility of a good deal of long-term pain for whatever short-term gain comes from losing public control of a service system we will likely never be able to get back.

Maybe it is a pipe dream to think that hundreds of thousands of us who are customers of Hydro One could organize a ban on paying our hydro bills to stop Wynne from following through on this scheme.

But at the very least we should go to our search engines and get the contact information for our provincial members of parliament, especially if they are Liberals, and flood their offices with email and phone messages demanding that this business not move forward.

At the same time, get the contact information for the Ontario Premier’s office and flood Wynne with expressions of opposition.

We should let Wynne know, in no uncertain terms, that although she may be close to three years away from another provincial election, if she follows through on this sell-off, we won’t forget to vote her government out of office when the time comes.

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