Bill 109, An Act to amend the Taxation Act, 2007 to implement the Ontario energy and property tax credit and to make consequential amendments

Mr. Peter Tabuns:

…I just want to touch on the explanatory note so that everyone who is watching is aware. It’s the act to amend the Taxation Act, 2007, to implement the Ontario energy and property tax credit. The explanatory note in this bill says, “The Taxation Act, 2007 is amended to implement the Ontario energy and property tax credit announced in the 2010 Ontario Budget.” It’s still 2010, so I guess it’s not too late. “The Ontario energy and property tax credit will apply for the 2010 and subsequent taxation years and will have two components: a property tax amount and an energy amount. For 2010, the tax credit is claimed in income tax returns filed by qualified individuals for the year. Starting in 2011, the Ontario energy and property tax credit is calculated using income information from income tax returns filed for the previous year, but is payable directly to eligible individuals in four quarterly installments during the second half of the year and the first half of the following year.”

If I read that right, there should be a cheque sometime in the middle of next summer, with one promised for sometime in the fall. I have to say that that has to be more than fortuitous. It can’t simply be that some accountant somewhere thought that would be a convenient time to send out cheques.

What we’re dealing with here is a political problem that the government faces… This government has made substantial mistakes in the way it has governed Ontario. Premier McGuinty has made profound errors on the electricity file. In introducing the HST, he has introduced a tax that substantially transfers wealth from the bulk of the population to some of the wealthiest corporations in Ontario, and the time of consequences draws near. The time of the 2011 election draws near. When we in this chamber spend time thinking about bills, it is best for to us keep that reality in mind.

I take the opportunity, as a number of members in this chamber do, to go and talk to my constituents at their doors on a regular basis. I have to say to you that there are three things this government has done that are causing it and will continue to cause it profound difficulties. One is its electricity policy…Second is the fact that it did not correct the downloading of expenses on municipalities when the economy was strong: That burden on the backs of people in our cities and towns and villages across Ontario continues to be substantial and causes an anger that this government is having to deal with, which is why we have a property tax credit before us in the bill today. And there’s the HST itself, with all the difficulties that come in its train.

…This bill before us is meant to give people a little bit of money every quarter during an election year and presumably for every quarter thereafter.

If we look at why people are finding it difficult to pay their hydro bills, we need to look at what has been the McGuinty policy on electricity. What has he actually done to provide people in this province with electricity, how has he gone about it and what are the financial consequences of the choices that he made? I’ll go into more detail, but just a quick list: Bringing in the HST and applying it to an essential like electricity has made life difficult for a lot of people. He didn’t have to make that choice. He did not have to make that choice. He still has, in the time remaining to him before the election, the opportunity to correct at least part of his mistake when it comes to the electricity bills. If this government talks about the burden of the cost of electricity on seniors, it might well look to a decision that it itself made to put that burden on the backs of seniors.

This government might have engaged in an analysis of what our real hydro needs are… Up until the latter half of the 1990s, the old Ontario Hydro kept a database of electricity consumption, sector by sector, so they had a sense of how many air conditioners there were in the province and how many homes were not air-conditioned. They knew the air conditioning load in the centre of each city. They had a sense, numerically, statistically, in a database, of how much equipment was consuming how much power and what the potential was for growth.

My understanding was that that database research was discontinued in the Harris regime and was never reinstituted by this government, so that when this government looks at demand for power and thus makes decisions to commit itself to a billion-dollar power plant, it does it on the basis not of that sort of in-depth research but on the basis of drawing a line from where things have been in the past. That is not a wise way to make a decision, and I’ll speak to that at greater length.

This government decided to invest in smart meters and put a burden on the backs of seniors, put a burden on the backs of the rest of people in this society, with very little to show for it. That was a multi-billion dollar mistake in purchasing that is on the backs of these seniors, who are going to get a small part of that money back because of this bill.

This government did not deal with the question of privatization. It costs a lot of money to subsidize private companies to provide power. Bruce Power is getting a very, very good deal on Bruce energy. It is in a position where that nuclear power complex, which is having—what is it?—a $2-billion overrun on its current phase, having had an overrun in the past which was equivalent to about 100% of the initial cost—that company got $60 million last year for power it didn’t produce. That company has got a very good sweetheart deal from the province of Ontario.

Gas companies get to build gas-fired power plants and sell power at a very good price.

The global adjustment mechanism: Those private power companies that sell into the market and find the market doesn’t pay them enough get their losses covered in the global adjustment.

This government has made a commitment to nuclear power being the bulk of the power that we are going to pay for, for many, many years to come.

All of those pieces together—and I will go through them—show at the core a mistake on the part of this government in understanding what has to be done with electricity. There are consequences to making multi-billion dollar mistakes. People in this province are currently paying for them every day and, if the Minister of Finance is to be believed, with his graph in his economic update, are going to be paying a lot more for them in the next five to 10 years. That’s of consequence, and even an energy tax credit is not going to deal with those consequences. We’ll address it in a small way, but we’ll not do it in a fundamental way.

Once in a generation a population gets the opportunity to reshape its infrastructure. Frankly, over the last century, we have built an electricity system in Ontario, with renewable power initially at its core, that served us well. Power at cost, public power based on renewable sources and hydro made us an industrial dynamo. It’s critical to the standard of living that we have. That system over the century that was expanded into coal and into nuclear, that system that required the stringing of thousands of kilometres of high-voltage transmission lines—that whole system is coming to a point where it has to be rebuilt.

It’s coming to a point where part of it has to be shut down—coal-fired power—for reasons that you well understand, Speaker. People die from lung and heart disease related to the emissions from those coal plants. The climate that we depend on for our prosperity is being changed in part because of the contribution of those coal plants.

We here in this province, in a once-in-a-generation opportunity, can rebuild that electricity system to reflect the most advanced technologies of the 21st century, to reflect our needs as we understand them at this point in human history, and to use the development of electricity just as we did at the beginning of the 20th century: to make ourselves an economic power…