Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As we start into this year’s winter season, I hope my constituents won’t experience the struggles with power bills that many had to deal with last winter and spring. In the past couple of months, power companies have made the news, not due to high bills but because of major equipment failures. The Taltson hydro plant is out of service, Northlands Hay River has a generator that needs replacing and then suddenly the Bluefish hydro dam is about to fail and needs to be replaced. All of these situations lead to costly infrastructure replacements and under our current regulated utilities system, these costs must be borne by the affected community or communities. In this system, equipment and infrastructure failures can be called unforeseen expenditures by our utility companies -- that would be NTPC and NUL. The company can apply to the Public Utilities Board for authorization to recoup those financial losses from their customers -- that would be you and I. The result: electricity bill rate riders, here we come.
In my view, our system needs to change. Power companies must operate like any other private company. Equipment failures should be considered an unfortunate and occasional part of doing business and their associated replacement and maintenance costs should be planned for. All companies should have long-range plans in place for the replacement or acquisition of major infrastructure and the associated capital costs should be included in any company’s budget. Profit and revenues must be determined with capital costs included, not considered after the fact. For any business other than a power company this would be considered standard practice, but our power companies can avoid this task because the system allows them to do so. But the system can change, Mr. Speaker, if this Assembly wants it to.
I look forward with anticipation to the results of the recently held electricity review and I have no doubt that the recommendations of the review team will provide us with opportunities to affect the necessary change for our residents, change for the better. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko.
