Howard Epstein on Interprovincial Labour Mobility

Excerpt from Hansard: November 6, 2006
The honourable member for Halifax Chebucto

Subject: Energy Poverty

Let’s start first with energy poverty, because this bills seems, at least, to think about the reality of how hard it is for people to pay their bills. Well, today in the newspapers we saw people speaking up on behalf of that segment of Nova Scotians who are so poor and have such great difficulty paying their electricity bills that a term has been invented to describe the situation in which they find themselves, that term is energy poverty… the issue was raised at the Utility and Review Board. Representatives, through the agency of Dalhousie Legal Aid that came to speak on behalf of the poorest of the customers of Nova Scotia Power, said to the board, you should create a special system to deal with the poorest customers of Nova Scotia Power and the board threw up its hands and said… we don’t have the authority to do that…In the Utility and Review Board in the Public Utilities Act, they said - the very act that’s being amended by Bill No. 20 tonight - there is nothing that gives us the power to create a special category for the poorer customers of Nova Scotia Power … it struck me as a little strange, because there are different categories of payment plans that exist now with the blessing of the board and some of those categories include special deals, special arrangements for the very largest of customers like the pulp and paper plants. But no, there’s no legal authority to set up a special category for the poorest of customers. There’s legal authority to set up a special category for the largest of industrial customers but no legal authority to set up a special category for the poorest of customers… we find that this time in the current round of hearings before the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board, on the latest request for an increase from NSPI, Dalhousie Legal Aid again is going to be raising this issue and this time they’re going to raise it as a charter matter, so the Charter of Rights and Freedoms comes into it… Unfortunately what’s happening is that the advocates on behalf of the poor are having to go to court and use complex, detailed, and I have to say, extended litigation, to try to achieve their end. They could just as well be here in this Chamber. They should be having a response from the government… Are we to understand that the government thinks that the present situation is just fine? That it’s fine for a special category of rate to exist for the largest of industrial customers, but not a good thing to have a special category of rate for the poorest of customers. If that’s what the government thinks, maybe they should be clear and say so.

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