First of all, there's an un-level playing field today in terms of energy providers. Utilities collect information and report it. They have regulated rates and go through regulatory processes, so what's happening is very transparent. A main issue with electricity is making sure that you can provide that information on a community boundary. Sometimes electricity is not properly measured. With new technologies and new processes, if New Brunswick goes through with the advanced meter infrastructure, it should be able to report on a community level what the electricity consumption is.
Natural gas is in the same world. It's not a big fuel, in either your province or in mine, but it is an important part of it nevertheless.
The third thing that people use a lot of is home heating oil. In that case, there are a lot of individual companies, with dozens of very small players. In our report, we recognized that some of these very small players may, in fact, fall into a burden that's not worthwhile trying to get them to report in detail. They're not operating in a way... Technology may develop in the future, where somebody could meter it off the truck and so on.
We know who the big players are. There should be a way, over the time of refreshing their information systems, that they can get to a world where they're able to provide more information in a secure and respectful place. At the end of the day, the disclosure by large energy providers of what they're doing, in the interest of society, may very well balance out their desire to keep everything a secret all the time and tell no one.
There are many cases where society has decided that it needs to collect information because it is in the national or in the provincial interest. I note that yesterday, there was a story about collecting information on empty homes in British Columbia. Government is continually in the world of deciding that it needs to require people to report a little bit more, in order for it to make a good public policy decision. Then you get into the details of how much disclosure there is and whether you're giving an advantage to a competitor.
I had a conversation at one of our forums in New Brunswick, with somebody about an apartment building. I said, “Do you want to disclose the information about your energy consumption?” She said, “No. I'd rather not.” I said, “In Ontario, they're forcing all large companies to disclose.” She said, “Well, if everybody is doing it, then I don't have as much of a concern.”
I think there's a conversation that needs to be had. We started a conversation through the work that we did in Atlantic Canada and I think that conversation needs to continue.