Howard Epstein on Interprovincial Labour Mobility

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

Subject: Power Rate Increases

This bill essentially says that we should take the full legislative power of the Province of Nova Scotia in order to make sure that Nova Scotia Power Inc. does not try to go more than once a year to the Utility and Review Board to get approval for raising the electricity rates. They should only do us once a year, they shouldn’t try and whack us twice, or three times or four times a year… Apparently, we need legislation to do this because the government has come to the conclusion that Nova Scotia Power Inc., in its privatized form, is a predatory corporation. We need protection from it… Is this perhaps the kind of thought that should have occurred to the predecessors of that Party in 1992 when they privatized the publicly owned Crown corporation? They should have thought of it then. Has this become a predatory corporation? It’s time we thought about this. It’s time we looked back on the context that has led us to arrive at the point where 14 years later, the government is coming forward with a bill to try to tell our monopoly electrical utility to stop trying to get increases in their rates more than once a year because we, the consumers, we, their customers, probably can’t afford it…. Maybe it’s time for the government to look back in earnest and think about whether [privatization] was such a good deal, because we still have a monopoly situation, essentially. There are five or six small municipal utilities that buy power from Nova Scotia Power and resell within their own town boundaries, but it’s essentially a monopoly utility, with all of us as captive customers - businesses, homes and commercial establishments alike - and the rates have been going up year after year after year…. So where’s the benefit from this privatization? Nova Scotia Power, since privatization, year in, year out, has generated $100 million of profit - that is more than $1 billion of profit that they’ve generated that they paid out in dividends to their shareholders…more than $1 billion in dividends to their shareholders…Suppose the rates were still the same, but it was a public company? That money could have been used to improve the equipment; it could have been used to improve the environmental controls to limit emissions; or it could have been used to raise salaries for those linespeople, the ones who go out there in the dead of winter, in the storms like White Juan, and help us out when the system goes down… most of the owners of the shares of Nova Scotia Power are not in Nova Scotia. A lot of them are pension funds, a lot of them are big institutional investors, a lot of them are private investors elsewhere. That money left this province - not every last penny, but most of it certainly left this province, which is in and of itself an economic drain on us… Well, I think that it is time the government rethought this.

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