For the better part of the last week I’ve being trying to explain to people what the one issues of substance on this week’s council agenda was all about. I’ve only been semi-successful on this account.
Essentially, the Ontario Energy Board passed a motion in December in response to a new rate application from Enbridge, a provider of natural gas. Until December’s OEB decision, the installation of natural gas connections at new developments was a cost covered by the fees Enbridge collected. In other words, present customers are paying the cost of creating future customers, and the OEB felt the burden should be put on the developer like every other utility.
Enbridge told The Narwhal that the OEB’s decision “conveys strong bias” against natural gas and “sets a course to eliminate it from Ontario’s energy mix.” Ontario’s Minister of Energy Todd Smith added that putting the burden on home builders would “slow or halt the construction of new homes, including affordable housing.” And that’s why they started working on Bill 165 to reverse the decision through legislation.
To believe all this, you have to buy a couple of things. First, it’s the idea that developers having to pay for the construction of anything aside from four walls and roof is an impediment to housing construction. If that were the case, then we might has well have Alectra and the City of Guelph respectively cover the costs of installing electricity and water services on new houses.
You also have to believe that natural gas is cheaper, better, and more easily available than just about any other way to heat a home. And you have to believe that there’s a big future in backing natural gas as opposed to other alternatives.
Now, we live in an era of magical thinking, and if someone has enough money, influence, and power then it’s very easy to make people believe that pixie dust can make you fly. But we need to consider another couple of levels to this; one is the climate crisis, and the other is accountability.
Tackling the climate crisis is a massive issue, one that requires the co-ordination of all levels of government, institutions, corporations and the general public, but we have not had anything even close to a co-ordinated effort. On the government side in Ontario alone, we’ve got municipalities declaring climate emergencies while the provincial government seems immune to the desire to take any action while the federal government seems unable to create a unified national response.
Consider the fact that the federal carbon tax is scheduled to increase 23 per cent on Monday, and this comes in spite of a sustained campaign to cancel the increase in the name of affordability. The Parliamentary Budget Office has said that 80 per cent of families in Canada actually see a net benefit via the carbon tax rebate, and yet, it’s become the pre-eminent front on cost-of-living issues.
One of the people massaging this impression is Ontario Premier Doug Ford who announced this week that he was extending a freeze on Ontario’s gas tax while protesting the carbon tax increase in the name of affordability. But if the point of the carbon tax is to dissuade people from using fossil fuels – the primary driver of global climate change – by making them more expensive, doesn’t lowering the gas tax cancel out the effect?
Of course it does, and at the same time the provincial gas taxes fund municipal transit infrastructure and considering that over one-quarter or our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation, Ford is actually being ruinous on two fronts when it comes to the climate crisis.
I don’t expect Ford to understand this though, or anything, for that matter, that doesn’t fit into the experience of growing up in an upper middle class nuclear family in suburban Ontario in the 1970s and 80s. And it should go without saying that if you don’t like the cost of trying to prevent the effects of global climate change, you’re sure as hell not going to like paying for actual climate change.
That brings us to the accountability piece, and who the provincial government thinks they’re accountable too and why?
Over the last few years, the Ford government has shown that they believe that there’s only one force that can solve the housing crisis and that’s Ontario’s for-profit real estate developers. They’ve changed the rules so that municipal staff have to be more reactive to planning applications, they’ve changed the fee structure so that developers have to pay less, and they erased heritage lists so that history doesn’t stand in the way of builders.
Also, and this has gotten far less reporting, but the Ford government has massively undermined the authority of conservation authorities. And while the mandate of CAs has grown over the years, they are fundamentally meant to manage flood control along the province’s numerous water ways, and what long-term effect of climate change is more relevant to this part of the province than flooding?
And yet, since the Conservation Authorities Act is provincial legislation, it’s within the provincial government’s purview to change. The Ontario Energy Board though is the province’s *independent* energy regulator, and it’s hard to be independent if someone can come in and bootstrap their own point of view and override that independence because they don’t like the ruling.
This is why the details shouldn’t necessarily matter, and it was a lack of understanding about the details that prompted Mayor Cam Guthrie to vote against councillor Leanne Caron’s motion to back the OEB at this week’s meeting.
You don’t need to understand the intricacies of energy policy to stand against a government imposing their will on an independent regulator, and if there’s one group of people who should understand the frustration of being caught under the hydraulic press of Ford’s approach to governance, it’s city councils. One can focus on the impact on climate progress, and we should, but the bigger issue is that we have a provincial government that only believes in one authority, and that’s potentially the bigger danger.
