Ontario’s Affordable Energy Act is a great idea. But it’s a private member’s bill in a hyper-partisan legislature. To really address climate and affordability, its backers may need something more.
I read your Weekender with interest and a little disappointment. I understand that your take was to illustrate the politics of private members bills but in doing so you obscured the groundbreaking goal and contents of the Affordable Energy Act. Climate is not the main purpose of the bill. The goal is affordability - by getting serious about the deep retrofit supply chain and by giving all citizens the right to benefit from renewable energy - while at the same time proving good jobs, community benefits for all, and reduced emissions.
This is first time in Canada that a political party has taken a serious approach to building a deep retrofit supply chain, tenants retrofit rights, and supported the rights of all citizens to generate, store and share their own energy individually and through community ownership. For example the bill would support the development of fast modular retrofits, as well as community owned off site generation and subscription solar for low- and middle-income consumers. These are policies that Efficiency Canada, RE coops and local communities in Ontario and across Canada have been advocating for a long time - policies that have been in place in other countries in Europe, UK, NZ and the US for years.
Most fundamentally it puts policies supporting affordable clean energy and democratic community ownership of distributed energy resources on the map.
I'm glad you've filled in this additional detail, Roger, many thanks. It's interesting how much more the bill comes to life when you pull it out of legislative language and give it its full depth and context. The bill itself wouldn't have been the place to talk about what makes this new and groundbreaking, and the three MPPs clearly didn't have time to go there during their news conference. But I wish I'd been able to connect more of these dots when I was working on the original post.
Not by all accounts -- not nearly. The program was beginning to deliver on the expectation that the early public support would help build a homegrown renewables industry and drive down manufacturing costs when the Liberals dialled it back under partisan pressure. But even then, by the time the Conservatives took power in 2018, McGuinty/Wynne had left behind 758 signed renewable energy contracts for Ford to summarily cancel, as well as a fully-built, ready-to-roll wind farm for him to rip out of the ground.
To be very clear -- the concern about appearances in this post was not about Bill 172 itself. It's an excellent piece of legislation, and as Roger Peters points out in an earlier comment today, it's precedent-setting. The concern in this post was not about whether the Energy Affordability Act is worth passing, which it most certainly is, but whether it has a hope in hell of surviving when Ford holds such a commanding majority in the legislature.
Dear Mitchell:
I read your Weekender with interest and a little disappointment. I understand that your take was to illustrate the politics of private members bills but in doing so you obscured the groundbreaking goal and contents of the Affordable Energy Act. Climate is not the main purpose of the bill. The goal is affordability - by getting serious about the deep retrofit supply chain and by giving all citizens the right to benefit from renewable energy - while at the same time proving good jobs, community benefits for all, and reduced emissions.
This is first time in Canada that a political party has taken a serious approach to building a deep retrofit supply chain, tenants retrofit rights, and supported the rights of all citizens to generate, store and share their own energy individually and through community ownership. For example the bill would support the development of fast modular retrofits, as well as community owned off site generation and subscription solar for low- and middle-income consumers. These are policies that Efficiency Canada, RE coops and local communities in Ontario and across Canada have been advocating for a long time - policies that have been in place in other countries in Europe, UK, NZ and the US for years.
Most fundamentally it puts policies supporting affordable clean energy and democratic community ownership of distributed energy resources on the map.
I'm glad you've filled in this additional detail, Roger, many thanks. It's interesting how much more the bill comes to life when you pull it out of legislative language and give it its full depth and context. The bill itself wouldn't have been the place to talk about what makes this new and groundbreaking, and the three MPPs clearly didn't have time to go there during their news conference. But I wish I'd been able to connect more of these dots when I was working on the original post.
It's no doubt “appearances”. The McGuinty and Wynne liberals already tried the Ontariowende approach and by all accounts, failed spectacularly.
Not by all accounts -- not nearly. The program was beginning to deliver on the expectation that the early public support would help build a homegrown renewables industry and drive down manufacturing costs when the Liberals dialled it back under partisan pressure. But even then, by the time the Conservatives took power in 2018, McGuinty/Wynne had left behind 758 signed renewable energy contracts for Ford to summarily cancel, as well as a fully-built, ready-to-roll wind farm for him to rip out of the ground.
To be very clear -- the concern about appearances in this post was not about Bill 172 itself. It's an excellent piece of legislation, and as Roger Peters points out in an earlier comment today, it's precedent-setting. The concern in this post was not about whether the Energy Affordability Act is worth passing, which it most certainly is, but whether it has a hope in hell of surviving when Ford holds such a commanding majority in the legislature.