Compensation Pain (podcast)

One of the general themes of this website is to document how public policy debates over energy in Ontario don’t obviously display the collective wisdom to correctly identify even short-run cause and effect relationships. One example of this deficiency relates to labour compensation rates in the utility sector. Is executive compensation at OPG and Hydro …

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Ontario Electricity Regulation Crisis Report Part 130: Stonewalled by Guardians (Again)

Part 125 of this series featured a guest post by two retired Toronto Hydro employees, Paul Kahnert and David Grant, documenting their efforts to get action from the City’s Ombudsman, the City’s Auditor General, and the Ontario Energy Board in investigating evidence of negligence, perjury, and fraudulent claims by Toronto Hydro and its CEO Anthony …

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Ontario Electricity Regulation Crisis Report Part 125 Guest Post: Stonewalled by Guardians

What follows is a guest post presented by two former Toronto Hydro employees, Paul Kahnert and David Grant. They document their unsuccessful efforts on behalf of a larger group of retirees with intimate knowledge of the utility to engage the City’s Ombudsman, the City’s Auditor General, and the Ontario Energy Board in investigating malpractice at …

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Guest Post: “Who Will Regulate Electricity Distribution?” by Jay Shepherd

Toronto Hydro is by far the most costly and least reliable large urban electricity distribution utility in Ontario. But, behind the fog of the New Year’s holiday season the OEB slipped out approval for yet another whopping suite of rate increases, rewarding more bad behaviour at Toronto Hydro. Typical of the standards of truth that …

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Ontario Electricity Regulation Crisis Report Part 124: Toronto’s Interim Ombudsman Responds

I received the attached letter from the City of Toronto Interim Ombudsman in response to my posting at Part 122 of this series. The new letter, which follows a letter from Hydro One’s ombudsman (Part 123), characterizes my comments in Part 122 as containing “misleading statements”. I have comments on several details of that letter. …

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Ontario Electricity Regulation Crisis Report Part 122: Is Hydro One’s New Ombudsman Trustworthy?

Readers of this site following my reporting on interactions between Toronto Hydro and the Ontario Energy Board might recall an application I filed with Fiona Crean, Toronto’s ombudsman, in January this year. The final disposition of that application provides a disappointing indicator of what Hydro One consumers might expect, or not expect, from Ms. Crean, …

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Grabbing Cash from Municipalities to Fund Hydro One “Windfall”

Two themes of my public comments on the sale of Hydro One have been that there is no windfall available from the sale to fund government spending initiatives and that creating a Potemkin windfall will hasten Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation’s (OEFC) collapse into insolvency. Supporters of the Hydro One sale, including the Globe & Mail …

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