Natural Resources committee  Yes. I'm not the best person in our network, and I can get more information to the committee, for sure, from the person who is. The reliance on other fuels is something we should check and make sure data is being adequately collected. I haven't seen any data—probably because the programs are so new—about the differential impact of the climate change policies, so there would need to be some work to analyze what those possible differential impacts are and then collect that data and attribute it to low-income families versus non-low-income families.

Natural Resources committee  When I mentioned California, I said they took a number of different approaches to even address this problem, so even though I have referenced that jurisdiction they didn't think that their normal statistics and data collection would get the answers they needed about the barriers to accessing clean energy and this kind of thing.

Natural Resources committee  To be honest, we don't have a ton of expertise in Canada in that, although it's improving as different utilities adopt these programs, for sure, and they start to develop in-house capacity. The Low-Income Energy Network has access to an expert named Roger Colton, who has actually been used by a number of utilities both in Canada and the United States as well as by advocacy groups like us.

Natural Resources committee  You're welcome.

Natural Resources committee  I was just looking at the Financial Accountability Office's analysis and that was particular to 2014. I don't know if we've summarized that anywhere. I think that's the kind of thing that could and should be summarized. I'm not totally sure. The Ontario Energy Board might have done a little bit of that here, but I'm not positive.

Natural Resources committee  We do now. Unfortunately, I don't have the number off the top of my head. There were some inquiries by media last year and the year before, and the Ontario Energy Board is now collecting and publishing the number of disconnections from different utilities across the province here.

Natural Resources committee  Definitely more of them are renters, because more low-income families are renters in the first place. In a lot of non-urban areas, definitely a lot of the seniors on fixed incomes will also not necessarily have good insulation in their housing and that kind of thing. I don't think the percentage is higher for seniors, but it's quite significant when it happens because then you have a lot of other health effects coming from the seniors not having a healthy temperature in their homes, and then there are also choices around medication.

Natural Resources committee  No, it wasn't that they were cheaper. It was that they're using electricity and natural gas, and almost no other fuels like heating oil and so on. I was just making the point that when we're looking at energy policy and the data we need for energy policy, we need to take into account that in a lot of non-urban areas people aren't necessarily relying on just their local utility.

Natural Resources committee  No. That would be a great question to analyze, because the Ontario Medical Association was the leading organization that had analyzed the health effects in Ontario of the coal use and the number of deaths that were happening with those smog days. That's a great question to follow up, about the low-income component of that.

Natural Resources committee  Overall, I would—

Natural Resources committee  They would basically be the same. I'm not advocating for a new institution for the sake of a new institution. The question that I'm trying to answer is, if there's going to be a new energy collecting institution and analysis organization, it needs to not forget about low-income issues and energy poverty issues.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, we'll do that.

Natural Resources committee  Yes. For low-income households in particular, we have pointed to British Columbia, California, some of the other U.S. states, and other jurisdictions like Quebec in our advocacy here when we were trying to persuade our province that it needed a low-income-specific rebate or some way of alleviating the actual financial impact.

Natural Resources committee  The data we've analyzed the most has been Ontario data in our role as an Ontario legal aid clinic. However, in attending a national energy poverty conference for a few years and working with my colleagues who do reach out to people at Dalhousie and elsewhere, we see there are differences in the data that's collected and analyzed.

Natural Resources committee  First of all, on the question of unintended consequences, that's true in many parts of the country. There was quite a push here too for social housing and many forms of housing to be heated with electricity back in the seventies, for example, when it was perceived that electricity was a very cheap form of power.