In New Brunswick, there are several battles going on: the one between the power deal with Quebec and the H1N1 vaccine for top news story. Then there's the one within that power deal between the those for and those against. There are a lot of kneejerk responses to the power deal, some of which are discouraging for the cultural and societal biases that inform them.
The thing about the proposed deal to sell NB Power to Hydro-Quebec is that the more you look at it and the more you try to educate yourself to make a thoughtful decision on it, the more muddled it gets. Simplistically, it eliminates a lot of New Brunswick's debt. It also freezes residential rates for five years. And that all sounds good, except that after five years all bets are off. Kinda. After five years, rates will only increase to keep pace with inflation ... as long as needs don't grow. If we grow the way we need to in order to prosper, or at least to maintain the status quo, we would likely need to add more generation, costs New Brunswick would pick up (not Hydro-Quebec, as I understand it).
A lot of concern has been raised about the aspect of selling off key assets. It concerns me too. Hydro-Quebec is agreeing to this deal for a reason: it wants those assets. They provide the company with greater access to the U.S. energy market that most people assume will have a great need for energy from this side of the border (for their north eastern states). In order to manage it's debt, New Brunswick is trading off those assets.
On the surface it appears to me that New Brunswick is opting for short term gain at the expense of the long term.
But the more I think about it, I wonder if that isn't the only thing to do? I've been in New Brunswick for almost three years now and my gut perception is that politically there is no long term vision for this province. There is even less public will to actually tackle tomorrow. If those NB Power assets are retained by New Brunswick, they will likely remain assets with potential, potential never realized. So why not sell them off to someone who will actually use them to reach that potential?
Sold or retained, what this province needs more than anything is a genuine vision for the future. What will it look like? How do we get there? The "cross your fingers and hope everything stays the same" approach won't work.
From what I've seen, the majority of people are against the deal between NB Power and Hydro-Quebec. Fine. But what is the alternative? How do we manage our debt? What kind of future do we want? How do we achieve it collectively? What are we going to do with these assets?
One of my other worries about this deal is the idea of one public company being bought by another public company. If a public company is intended to serve its public, whose public gets served? Or at least, whose public gets served first? It strikes me as a situation where the old cliche applies: you can't serve two masters.
Yet another problem I see has to do with where the revenue goes. I'm not interested in simply selling NB Power and eliminating a good deal of debt. I want an investment -- a piece of Hydro-Quebec. I want to know that a portion of their revenue flows back to me, as it would if I were a shareholder. From what I've seen (and I may have this wrong) we don't even get to tax them in New Brunswick. There is no long term benefit to selling NB Power to Hydro-Quebec unless there is assurance that a portion of revenue flows into New Brunswick. There is a reason Hydro-Quebec wants access to that U.S. market. It would be as if a deal was signed and all the revenue from the Alberta oil sands went to B.C. instead of the government of Alberta.
And that's my bit of muddled thinking on this power deal. I'm still not sure if it's good or bad but I do know that the more I learn about it, the more concerned I am with it. But perhaps the largest issue at hand is the ongoing one of New Brunswick being very good at knowing what it doesn't want to do but not having a clue or any inclination regarding what it does want to do.
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