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Everyone on the board of Hydro One should resign immediately, Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford says, for making it expensive for him to fire the utility company’s chief executive only because he wants to.
“Today in Ontario, we have seniors unable to pay the rent and families being forced to choose between heating and eating, all because of the hydro mess,” Ford said Thursday morning at an appearance on his home turf in Etobicoke. “Now, we are learning that the millionaires club running Hydro One have agreed to Kathleen Wynne’s $6-million man getting an additional $10 million should he be fired.”
So, OK, there’s a lot there. In a nutshell, several months ago the Hydro One board changed the contracts of the executives it hires so that stock options they get will still be good if they’re fired without cause after the provincial government fires the board.
Which is what Ford promised to do earlier this week: Get rid of chief executive Mayo Schmidt and his $6-million pay package or I’ll fire all of you and put in people who will, he told the board members. He is angry that this won’t be free.
Mayo Schmidt in 2012, when he was chief executive of Viterra.
“I’m going to start cleaning up Kathleen Wynne’s hydro mess on Day 1,” Ford said. “Starting with getting rid of the $6-million man and the other millionaire cronies on the hydro board. Nobody gets to get rich for ripping you off on your hydro bills. We’re the only party that has a plan to clean up the hydro mess and lower hydro bills for the people.”
Thus far, the only — the only! — thing in the plan is to fire Schmidt. There is no second bullet point. Ford has an attitude, not a plan.
When the Liberals under leader Wynne sold off majority control of the former public utility, they kept a unilateral right to fire the board, a power no minority shareholder would ordinarily have. The board understandably sought to protect itself from being fired unilaterally, and to protect its chief executive from being fired for political reasons. If Schmidt is pushed out against the board’s wishes, because a new premier decides to make him a scapegoat or just wants to insert his own crony, Schmidt gets paid.
Hydro One is the transmission utility carved out of the old Ontario Hydro, whose job is to move millions of watts of electricity across long distances. It also has 1.3 million direct customers of its own, mostly in rural areas with no municipal power-delivery companies to take them on.
Power lines are natural monopolies. It’s not practical to have separate networks of high-tension wires crisscrossing the landscape, hooked up to the same dams and nuclear plants at one end and the same houses and businesses at the other. Privatizing Hydro One didn’t change that.
A Hydro One office is pictured in Mississauga.
As a monopoly, Hydro One could never be allowed to fail no matter how badly it screwed up. But it also could never be allowed to act fully like a business. It couldn’t cut off remote customers who cost more to serve than they pay, for instance. The Liberals sent Hydro One out into the corporate wilds and told it to act like the other companies it sees out there, but it’s not like them. It’s a weird mutant that galumphs around trying to fit in, belonging nowhere.
The Liberals have an honest answer to complaints about Hydro One salaries: There’s no problem to fix. Hydro One is part-owned by the province but its employees aren’t public servants and it doesn’t answer to Ontarians any more than Shopify does.
“Hydro One is now a publicly-traded company, not a government entity,” Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault said in the legislature Thursday, when Progressive Conservative MPP Vic Fedeli went at him on the issue. The board sets executive pay, Thibeault said, not us.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, right, speaks as Ontario Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault looks on during a press conference in Toronto on Thursday, March 2, 2017, to announce the government’s hydro relief plan.
Most people won’t find that satisfactory at this point, but poke around private U.S. power utilities and you’ll find that their presidents and vice-presidents indeed are paid like Hydro One’s. The president of Consumers Energy in Michigan (more direct customers, smaller territory) is paid $8.8 million Cdn. The chief executive of New England’s Unitil (fewer customers, smaller territory) is paid $4.4 million Cdn. The CEO of Con Edison in New York (lots more customers, much smaller territory) is paid $12.2 million Cdn.
Hydro One’s executive pay is out of whack compared with other public servants’, though. Against the president of Hydro-Québec’s $543,000, Schmidt’s $6 million is ludicrous.
The New Democrats have a different honest answer: Hydro One should be a public utility and we’re going to buy it back and then we’ll be in charge of it.
The Ford solution is apparently to leave Hydro One out there like an independent corporation but yell at it until it does what he wants.
Making Hydro One a semi-private corporation turned it into a pitiable monstrosity. What it does is naturally a public service in the first place, and selling just over half of it produced some quick cash at the cost of long-term profits. Meanwhile, whatever private-sector discipline it got is being wiped out by the punishment it’s taking for daring to act like the private company the Liberals told it to be.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
“Today in Ontario, we have seniors unable to pay the rent and families being forced to choose between heating and eating, all because of the hydro mess,” Ford said Thursday morning at an appearance on his home turf in Etobicoke. “Now, we are learning that the millionaires club running Hydro One have agreed to Kathleen Wynne’s $6-million man getting an additional $10 million should he be fired.”
So, OK, there’s a lot there. In a nutshell, several months ago the Hydro One board changed the contracts of the executives it hires so that stock options they get will still be good if they’re fired without cause after the provincial government fires the board.
Which is what Ford promised to do earlier this week: Get rid of chief executive Mayo Schmidt and his $6-million pay package or I’ll fire all of you and put in people who will, he told the board members. He is angry that this won’t be free.
Mayo Schmidt in 2012, when he was chief executive of Viterra.
“I’m going to start cleaning up Kathleen Wynne’s hydro mess on Day 1,” Ford said. “Starting with getting rid of the $6-million man and the other millionaire cronies on the hydro board. Nobody gets to get rich for ripping you off on your hydro bills. We’re the only party that has a plan to clean up the hydro mess and lower hydro bills for the people.”
Thus far, the only — the only! — thing in the plan is to fire Schmidt. There is no second bullet point. Ford has an attitude, not a plan.
When the Liberals under leader Wynne sold off majority control of the former public utility, they kept a unilateral right to fire the board, a power no minority shareholder would ordinarily have. The board understandably sought to protect itself from being fired unilaterally, and to protect its chief executive from being fired for political reasons. If Schmidt is pushed out against the board’s wishes, because a new premier decides to make him a scapegoat or just wants to insert his own crony, Schmidt gets paid.
Hydro One is the transmission utility carved out of the old Ontario Hydro, whose job is to move millions of watts of electricity across long distances. It also has 1.3 million direct customers of its own, mostly in rural areas with no municipal power-delivery companies to take them on.
Power lines are natural monopolies. It’s not practical to have separate networks of high-tension wires crisscrossing the landscape, hooked up to the same dams and nuclear plants at one end and the same houses and businesses at the other. Privatizing Hydro One didn’t change that.
A Hydro One office is pictured in Mississauga.
As a monopoly, Hydro One could never be allowed to fail no matter how badly it screwed up. But it also could never be allowed to act fully like a business. It couldn’t cut off remote customers who cost more to serve than they pay, for instance. The Liberals sent Hydro One out into the corporate wilds and told it to act like the other companies it sees out there, but it’s not like them. It’s a weird mutant that galumphs around trying to fit in, belonging nowhere.
The Liberals have an honest answer to complaints about Hydro One salaries: There’s no problem to fix. Hydro One is part-owned by the province but its employees aren’t public servants and it doesn’t answer to Ontarians any more than Shopify does.
“Hydro One is now a publicly-traded company, not a government entity,” Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault said in the legislature Thursday, when Progressive Conservative MPP Vic Fedeli went at him on the issue. The board sets executive pay, Thibeault said, not us.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, right, speaks as Ontario Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault looks on during a press conference in Toronto on Thursday, March 2, 2017, to announce the government’s hydro relief plan.
Most people won’t find that satisfactory at this point, but poke around private U.S. power utilities and you’ll find that their presidents and vice-presidents indeed are paid like Hydro One’s. The president of Consumers Energy in Michigan (more direct customers, smaller territory) is paid $8.8 million Cdn. The chief executive of New England’s Unitil (fewer customers, smaller territory) is paid $4.4 million Cdn. The CEO of Con Edison in New York (lots more customers, much smaller territory) is paid $12.2 million Cdn.
Hydro One’s executive pay is out of whack compared with other public servants’, though. Against the president of Hydro-Québec’s $543,000, Schmidt’s $6 million is ludicrous.
The New Democrats have a different honest answer: Hydro One should be a public utility and we’re going to buy it back and then we’ll be in charge of it.
The Ford solution is apparently to leave Hydro One out there like an independent corporation but yell at it until it does what he wants.
Making Hydro One a semi-private corporation turned it into a pitiable monstrosity. What it does is naturally a public service in the first place, and selling just over half of it produced some quick cash at the cost of long-term profits. Meanwhile, whatever private-sector discipline it got is being wiped out by the punishment it’s taking for daring to act like the private company the Liberals told it to be.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
