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.
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.
It's no doubt “appearances”. The McGuinty and Wynne liberals already tried the Ontariowende approach and by all accounts, failed spectacularly.