Mr. Speaker, one of the most important issues facing consumers in the province of Ontario these days is the cost of hydro. As a result of that, a few weeks ago I posed to the Minister of Finance the question, why are Ontario consumers paying goods and services tax on what is called the debt reduction charge on their hydro bill?
The debt reduction charge is a device of the provincial government that is based upon a percentage of consumption. It is money which is extracted from hydro users in Ontario. It flows directly from their bill through their local utility to a corporation called the Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation which pays off the debt of the former Ontario Hydro.
GST is a rather innocuous thing; we pay 5¢ here or 7¢ there. Let us consider that Ontario residents are going to repay a debt which is in excess of $17 billion. On that amount, they have the pleasure of paying GST at the rate of 7% which amounts to more than $1.2 billion.
We are in the remarkable scenario where one level of government has written up a very large debt and another level of government will benefit because the other was incompetent. Let me give an example of how this whole scenario is so outrageous. If one were to borrow $1,000 from a bank at 10% and agreed to repay it in one year, one would pay $1,100 and would be done with it. If the bank were to call and say it wanted another $77 in GST, the person would be outraged.
People in Ontario are outraged because the finance department is saying the GST is fixed in, that there are a lot of reasons and it is all very technical, but it gets to collect more than $1.2 billion. The finance department is the beneficiary of the misfortune of the consumers in Ontario.
It is fine to say that Mr. Eves should change his position and should restructure his bill. That is easy to say in this place also. However the end result is that Ontario consumers are going to shell out $1.2 billion which we are going to receive here and we have delivered neither goods nor services. It comes as a great surprise to people who understood that the GST was to be paid if they received some tangible good or service. Neither apply in this case. The end result is that people are outraged.
We are now in a scenario where we should come around to something called equity, and I am referring to equity as being fairness. It is incumbent upon the finance department to think about the fairness of this. The finance department should think about Ontario consumers. Those who are hard pressed to pay their hydro bills are now enriching the finance department by more than $1 billion simply because they have the misfortune of living in Ontario where Ontario Hydro ran up a debt.