Ontario Hansard - 28-September2009

Mr. Peter Tabuns: There's no question that building a smart grid in Ontario is advantageous to us, but the investment in smart meters in individual homes and small businesses is a mistake. It's the wrong direction for Ontario, and it means that we are going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on penalizing people for trying to cook lunch for themselves at midday when we could be taking that hundreds of millions of dollars and putting it into insulation in people's homes, on long-term rental or lease programs. We could put it into solar panel siding for hospitals and schools. We could be putting it into a wide variety of efficiency and conservation investments. But that money is going to be used up making sure that seniors who spend their whole day at home with a refrigerator going they are not going to turn off, listening to a radio or watching television, just trying to get about their daily lives, are going to pay more in future than they've paid in the past for everyday living. That is not the direction this province should be going in.

I've heard from seniors and I've heard from small businesses that they are hit hard during the day because they don't have the opportunity-well, frankly, would it be a good thing for them to stay up all through the night to take advantage of the low-cost electricity and sleep during the day? That's not a practical thing for them; they can't shift that way.

The province, the Liberal government, has made a huge mistake with this, and we will continue to pay for it for decades to come.