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The proposed sale of the assets of NB Power to Hydro-Québec strikes me as being unfair to the people of New Brunswick. Commercial customers will get equivalent rates to those in Quebec, but residential customers will not get this benefit.

New Brunswick residents paid the expense of bringing NB Power into existence through their taxes and sustained the ever-increasing debt of the utility, again through tax payments. Of course, the residents of New Brunswick also paid their charges for service each year. Now, if the government abandons ownership, the taxpayers of New Brunswick will be left in much worse shape than industries in the province.

At the moment, the charge for residential customers in N.B. is nearly twice that of the charge for those in Quebec. The only benefit that local residential customers will receive is that this higher rate won't go up for the next five years.

The government claims that this is lowering rates. It isn't. It's just not putting the charges up over the next five years, and then the government describes this as a "saving." I guess that it's just how you phrase these things.

Now it has been admitted by Thierry Vandal, the CEO of Hydro-Québec, that the government of New Brunswick made no effort to negotiate lower residential power rates. It seems this request didn't even make it onto the table at the start of negotiations.

Large and medium-sized businesses in the province will be given rates equivalent to those of similar businesses in Quebec. These big industries get a rate reduction of 30 per cent. If only the residential users could be so lucky.

Then, after five years, residential rates will go up by the rate of inflation, plus an additional charge for the cost of new generation, whatever that means. Inflation will probably rise significantly over the next five years, given the current tendency of all governments to print money, so expect a significant increase in rates in New Brunswick after five years.

I suppose that five years seems quite far away, but when it comes to an essential service such as supplying electricity, being unable to pay your bill is not an attractive proposition. Given the severity of our winters, we should try to avoid people in this province being left to freeze in the dark.

The memorandum of understanding that has been signed gives agreement on general ideas, but the details are still subject to negotiation before the final contract is agreed upon. I think that the government should work very hard in negotiations of the final contract to protect residential customers. The contract should state that after a five-year freeze on residential rates, which will give Hydro-Québec more income from N.B. residential users than from customers in Quebec, the rates in N.B. should be set equivalent to those in Quebec. Failing that, at least government should negotiate a cap on how much residential rates can be increased annually. In the long term, it would be fair for the rates in both provinces to be the same.

NB Power was brought to its knees by the incessant use of the organization for political purposes. One example is the failure, from time to time, to increase charges when it was warranted, and therefore debt accumulated. There were jobs given to political favourites, and a board stacked with such people. Having brought the organization to its knees at least partly through political interference with its operations, the province is now abandoning NB Power.

Another problem with the memorandum of understanding is that the organizational structure of NB Power is to be left in place. The management of NB Power has been less than robust. Consider the $4.75 billion debt that this agency has run up.

The problem with selling NB Power is that you can only do it once. If a response to mismanagement in this province is to sell things, where do you stop? NB Power today, perhaps the Crown Lands tomorrow. The public universities could be privatized and sold off. How about the community colleges? Split them off from government and sell some of them to a corporation that specializes in occupational training. We've got a drive-through highway that's already owned by a private sector corporation, and we're paying through the nose for that particular divestiture.

It's a prime responsibility of government to see that the public organizations of the province are well run. It's also a responsibility to protect the interests of the people of the province.

Jo-Ann Fellows is a writer living in Fredericton. Her columns on seniors' concerns and on public policy issues appear twice a month on Mondays.