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Bill 50 - Electric Utilities Amendment Act (Third Reading)

Ms Blakeman:

Thank you so much, Mr. Speaker. I’m glad of the opportunity to speak in third reading in favour of the hoist motion that is before us on the floor. I, as you know, listened to most of the debate and tried to keep up on Hansard for that which I wasn’t present for or able to listen to on the program sound and had a good exchange with the Minister of Energy in Committee of the Whole back and forth on some of the observations that I had made or that I had heard others make, but I’ll admit that coming into this, I wasn’t exactly warm to the idea. To be honest, I think the government failed to make their case around this bill, and that’s why I’m supporting the hoist motion.

I don’t think this bill is saveable, and I don’t think it should pass. I think it should be sent back. = Somebody else was referring to a mulligan, the golf term, where it’s like a do over, but it’s completely without any kind of recrimination or bias. Indeed, I think that’s what we do need to do here. Really, I came at this from two ways. There are two sorts of responses that wash back against me. One is that this bill was actually created to address a very specific set of circumstances: you needed the four lines; you needed to be able to do them now. Well, to be fair, that was about opportunities not taken in the past. For us to have to be put into a hurry-up mode because there was a failure to plan or to put things in place from the government, really I don’t think that the cost, the burden of that should be borne by the consumers and by the citizens. If the government was able to make that case of urgency, which, I would argue, they didn’t, but if they were able to make that case for urgency, then it should have been specific to the problem at hand.

What we’ve ended up with is a bill that goes far beyond that. I find that kind of decision-making problematic, whether it’s done by the government or whether it’s done by almost anybody or even in your home life. You know, if you make a very broad policy decision based on one little problem in your house or in your personal life, you find that when you go to apply that to the next situation, it doesn’t fit exactly, yet you gave very specific parameters to your policy because it was designed around one problem. Now you’re trying to apply it to other ones, and it doesn’t work. That was the initial point that I had a problem with, that it was designed for a very specific set of circumstances, and it doesn’t stop there.

I would have been warmer to this idea if it had had a very specific sunset clause in it, which essentially was one of the sub-amendments that my colleague was trying to make to make this bill a bit more palatable, and that was not acceptable to the government. They want, you know, all or nothing. Then I thought: well, okay; if you’re going to try and make the case for this whole thing, then make the case. I think government failed to make the case. I think they failed to make the case on need.

There have been battling experts, but I’m impressed enough with the experts that I’ve heard that make the point about the AESO and that their case is unconvincing and overstates the urgency. I think the government failed to make the case for the level of expense that is going to be required for what is anticipated in these lines and the kind of lines they are. I think the government failed to make the case that consumers should be paying a hundred per cent of the cost when they have no legislative input to the need, to the cost, or almost anything else.

This is where they pop up on the other side and say: oh, they get to have input on the siting; the AUC can still do the siting hearings. Well, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but whoop-de-do. You know, that’s a pretty small compensation for the fact that we’ve now committed a whole bunch of people to an awful lot of money over a very long period of time, but hey, here’s the prize in the cereal box; you’re going to get to decide where it goes. It doesn’t quite make the case for me, Mr. Speaker.

I think that there were other options that were available, and the government failed to consider them. I think there’s also an argument that the government failed to make the case to show why consumers should pay for lines that were built for export, and clearly one of the lines is built for export. We hear from the Member for CalgaryGlenmore that, you know, there are some negotiations going on in Las Vegas around one of these lines that is definitely going to tie into what we’re doing. Why on earth are the consumers in Alberta paying for that? Where is the protection that we would expect the government to be making on our behalf as consumers and as citizens? That’s a role that only the government can play. I’ve talked about that before, too. I think the other and the final point for me is that the government has failed to show why the consumers are paying today for overbuilt lines which will not be used for some time to come.

There were some modifications that the government made through their amendments. I feel that they danced around the real issues. You know, yes, we’re going to get provided some information, but we only get provided that information once construction is already started. Again, it doesn’t come up to the mark on participation, particularly for those that are footing the bill. Having watched this long process – and we’ve now been debating this for a week and a day – I think the government failed to make the case. Therefore, I am in support of the hoist motion that’s in front of us, and I urge my colleagues in the Assembly to do the same.

Thank you.