City councillors have been talking about PDI sale since 2014: Activist

An activist who doesn’t want council to sell the city-owned electrical utility to Hydro One says he can prove councillors have been privately discussing a possible deal since 2014 – even though they have said they’ve only been talking about it for nine months.

Roy Brady filed a Freedom of Information request asking to see any records of closed-session meetings where councillors discussed the possibility of selling PDI.

He received the documents on Monday. He said they reveal that the topic was first discussed in closed session on July 28, 2014.

Brady said he was unhappy to find out that the privatization of PDI was first discussed by councillors in closed session two years ago. But he wasn’t surprised.

“We’re finding out all kinds of things from City Hall – it’s just absurd,” he said.

City council is considering selling PDI to Hydro One. No offer has been made yet, but negotiations have been ongoing for several months.

Hydro One and PDI have said the city would likely net between $40 million and $50 million if the sale goes forward.

Council could then decide to invest that money to yield an annual return of $2 million for the city, which doubles the revenues now generated by PDI.

But the idea hasn’t been popular. When the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) commissioned an Environics poll, 93 per cent of citizens said they didn’t want PDI sold to Hydro One.

Mayor Daryl Bennett said Monday that it’s true councillors first started talking about the future of PDI in closed-session meetings some time in the middle of 2014.

But Hydro One hadn’t expressed an interest in buying yet, he said. The Ontario government had begun encouraging cities to consider selling off their smaller utilities, and that had spurred a general discussion about the future of PDI.

“All we were talking about then was the concept of a sale,” he said.

Bennett said that talks with Hydro One only began about nine months ago.

Coun. Dean Pappas, who opposes the idea of selling PDI, said he doesn’t recall when the idea of selling the utility was first mentioned in closed session.

Coun. Diane Therrien, who also opposes a sale, wasn’t on council in July 2014 (she was elected in November of that year).

Coun. Keith Riel, another proponent of keeping PDI in public hands, said councillors have only been discussing a sale to Hydro One for eight months.

Next Tuesday starting at 7 p.m. at Market Hall, councillors and the public are expecting to hear a presentation from the city’s consultant, Navigant, on whether it should sell PDI.

Riel said he’s upset the city hired the consultant because he can do his own research to tell him whether or not the city should sell PDI.

“I’ll just have one question to ask them: What’s the deal?” he said on Monday.

Riel meant the only piece of information yet to be revealed is the exact sum the city could expect in a deal with Hydro One.

Adam Coones, an organizer of the campaign called Save PDI, said he wasn’t surprised at Brady’s findings.

“Sadly, I am not surprised that the discussion of this sale has gone back as far as the last term of city council,” he said.

“I would only hope that the sale of a public asset as big as PDI would take at least a couple of years to examine and research.”