Province says Hydro One service is improving
Hydro One’s notoriously bad customer service is getting much better now that the corporation has been mostly privatized, Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault says.
Thibeault has the ugly job of defending his Liberal government’s selling a majority stake in the former Crown corporation, explaining why Ontario’s electricity system isn’t actually that bad, while simultaneously trying to fix the system’s problems and make it cheaper.
“At the end of the day, this is why we’ve been doing this, is to make (Hydro One) a better-run company, to have that privateenterprise focus on keeping your customers happy and making sure you can meet the needs of the province, because they are our transmission highway,” he said in an interview during a preThanksgiving Ottawa swing.
Hydro One is both Ontario’s transmission utility, in charge of the heavy-duty wires that move electricity in bulk from dams and nuclear plants, and the distribution company that delivers power to 1.3 million final users. They’re mostly rural, though the company’s territory extends into Ottawa’s villages and outer suburbs. It has high costs to serve relatively remote customers and unless they want to go off the grid, they have no choice but to pay.
Hydro One’s bad customer service — the subject of an entire special report by André Marin in 2015, when he was Ontario’s crusading provincial ombudsman — added insult to the injury of rising electricity prices for millions of Ontarians, making it a symbol of corporate callousness married to government inefficiency.
People got charged for places that had burned down. The Petawawa military base got a bill for $4,500 one month, $50 million the next. One Ottawa guy got an $11,000 bill for five years’ worth of electricity he’d already paid for and couldn’t get it fixed until he contacted Marin following 40 useless phone calls to the company.
Selling 60 per cent of the company has brought in billions of dollars for the government to spend, but Thibeault said the customerservice benefits are marked, too. Overdue bills are down by a quarter from this time a year ago, the company says, and disconnections are down two-thirds.
They’ve figured out that sending workers out to cut off somebody’s power over a $500 overdue bill, at a cost of $1,500, might not be good business, Thibeault said. A payment plan is probably better.
You might hate how much you pay for power, the minister acknowledged, but at least if you call Hydro One you get a human being who works for Hydro One, since it stopped contracting out its call-centre work.
Thursday, tacked onto an Ontario Power Generation board meeting in Cornwall, Thibeault was at the St. Albert Cheese Co-op to tout a boost in the factory’s juice. After the cheese factory burned down in 2013, the owners rebuilt it much bigger, which meant they needed more electricity.
“They were told by Hydro One, ‘No, we don’t have the capacity to give you more,’ ” Thibeault said. “Here they were, wanting to grow, wanting to add capacity, wanting to create jobs, and the company just said, ‘No.’ The new company actually ... said, ‘No, we can take a look at this again.’ ”
That’s how he described Hydro One now — “the new company.”
And in fairness it has a new board and new top management to go along with the new privatized ownership. Leaders so well paid the Ontario Energy Board, which regulates prices, recently cut a Hydro One request to increase rates because its administration costs are too high. Chief executive Mayo Schmidt makes $4.4 million, which would have been most of Hydro One’s central-office budget a few years ago (that budget, under Hydro One’s rate request, was to rise past $20 million next year).
But at least helping the businesses it serves use more of the electricity it sells to produce more stuff and make more money seems to have penetrated Hydro One’s awareness as a good idea. It’s increasing the St. Albert cheese factory’s power supply by half, Thibeault said.
“This is what we need to do,” Thibeault said. “We need to be able to help businesses grow and expand. Whereas before it was, ‘It’s not in our business plan. It’s not going to happen.’ ”
It’s difficult to put numbers on the state of Hydro One’s customer service now. That brutal report from André Marin was based on more than 10,000 complaints, but Marin solicited them, urging people to write in with what they had.
Since the privatization, Hydro One has had its own in-house ombudsman — a person Marin warned was likely to be an “ombuds-weenie,” in thrall to the corporation’s board, not the public. First in the job was Toronto’s well-regarded former ombudsman Fiona Crean, but she quit after barely a year to join a charity.
The office’s one report so far, issued by her staff after Crean left and covering about three-quarters of 2016, counted 1,919 total complaints against the company. So the numbers are way down, for what that’s worth, though the tone hasn’t changed much.
“A prominent theme in complaints received concern customers’ communications with Hydro One. In those cases, customers did not believe Hydro One cared about their circumstances or would understand their story,” the report said.
Still some work to do, then.