Curbing Ottawa’s Skyrocketing Power Bill

This article warns of the danger for Canada, should our federal government wade further into the electricity sector.

The article was coauthored with Brian Lee Crowley, Managing Director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an independent non-partisan public policy think tank in Ottawa. The Macdonald-Laurier Institute was only launched a short time ago, but it is already very influential.

The New Brunswick Times and Transcript newspaper carried the column and it attracted some interesting comments from readers. The column later appeared in the New Brunswick Telegraph Journal here.

3 Comments

  1. I read the column and I strongly disagree with the conclusion. This cross-Quebec power line without the consent of Quebec is pure pipe dream. Nonsense. Won’t happen.

    Even if the federal government could expropriate a corridor through Quebec (there would obviously be constitutional and political ramifications to such an act), the rest of the story would be a war of trenches between the owner operator of the line and the entire bureaucratic machinery of Quebec and its largest Crown Corporation.

    Siting would be a nightmare. On top of the enforcement of labour laws, workers safety, manpower availability, environmental standards and practices, even NERC and NPCC reliability standards, as applied on the Quebec Interconnection by TransÉnergie. You name it.

    Combine a little of all this and unit costs will go through the roof, making that power uneconomic. So what’s the next step? Socialize the cost of wheeling power from Labrador to Ontario to the Quebec ratepayers? I can’t wait to read the brief explaining this to the Régie de l’énergie…

  2. This is an odd article considering the nature of the paper it refers to. The thrust of the linked paper is that it is dangerous to talk about using NAFTA for a cap-n-trade system, as, among other things, the possible political fallout makes it difficult to implement.

    Ok, sure, I’ll buy that.

    But then while describing that paper, this article floats the idea of a landline from Labrador to Quebec?

    Really? Odd.

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