THUNDER BAY -- The Ontario legislature passed legislation on Wednesday morning which prevents electricity distribution companies from disconnecting customers in the winter.
The mandatory requirement follows a request from the Liberal government last week that distributors "voluntarily" stop disconnects during cold-weather months.
Thunder Bay Hydro had already agreed to that, but a spokesperson says that, in any case, it's "very rare" for the city utility to cut off residential customers for non-payment of bills in the winter.
In an interview Wednesday, Eileen Dias said Thunder Bay Hydro's practice has been to avoid disconnections by installing a limiter— a device that restricts the amount of electricity a customer can use. "If you are using too much electricity in a load, you have too many things going at the same time, it would just cut off and you would have to go to your meter and re-set it."
Dias said limiters can be set at different consumption levels to accommodate, for example, a residence that is electrically-heated. They may also include a timer which will cut electricity for a set period.
She said these are tools that cause inconvenience for customers and are intended "to encourage people to make arrangements with us for payment" of their accounts.
Dias was unable to provide information as to the exact number of disconnects Thunder Bay Hydro has made, but said "certainly there are occasions where people have gone through a process with us and are simply unwilling to make appropriate arrangements with us in order to maintain their hydro."
She noted that the last disconnections she was aware of in the winter involved a situation where "they had actually been previously disconnected back in the summertime, and these properties were abandoned, so there wasn't even anybody to worry about whether they were getting their hydro reconnected."
Thunder Bay Hydro's web site provides information about customers' rights and the options for paying off overdue accounts.
Electricity distributors operate under guidelines established by the Ontario Energy Board (OEB).
Dias said distributors across the province are concerned.
"There's a bit of a socialization of high levels of arrears. That starts to become normalized within our society, and who then will be absorbing those losses?"
She said the Electricity Distributors Association would like the government to address the issue. "These are things that need to be thought out in a process...If you think of specific groups of customers, this may become a real pattern."
Data collected by the OEB shows that as of December, 2015, nearly 5,400 Thunder Bay Hydro residential customers' accounts were in arrears, well over double the number of delinquent accounts just two years earlier. The arrears at the end of 2015 totalled almost $760,000.
