New Brunswick’s Liberal government has released a plan on troubled NB Power, with a push to make skyrocketing electricity rates more affordable.
But New Brunswickers can’t count on a cap or price freeze, as both the premier and the province’s energy minister promised not to meddle in the Crown corporation’s rate setting, like provincial governments have done so many times in the past.
Instead, the Liberals introduced legislation this week that will see the creation of an independent energy sector consumer advocate’s office, meant to better represent residential and small business customers.
The new advocate will replace the public intervener for the energy sector, who represented all NB Power customers at rate hearings.
It is only one of a suite of NB Power reforms the Liberals promised to introduce before their mandate runs out in 2029.
Opposition parties predicted rates wouldn’t go down any time soon, a harsh reality considering they have gone up about a quarter in the last few years, costing the average household hundreds of dollars extra in yearly bill payments.
“More than a year ago, we were seeing New Brunswickers experiencing significant increases to their power bills, and big challenges when it came to the cost of living, and specifically, electricity and power in this province,” Premier Susan Holt said at news conference Monday beside Energy Minister René Legacy.
“We knew we needed to do something that they couldn’t, we couldn’t continue with the kind of nine per cent increases year over year that New Brunswickers had seen after their predecessors. So, we took action and assembled a panel of experts to do a comprehensive review of NB Power.”
That three-member expert review panel delivered a report eight weeks ago after nearly a year of consultation and study.
Holt said her government had accepted all its 50 recommendations, but warned that many would take years to see through and that they had to be done in stages.
The key actions include developing a new provincial energy policy, modernizing the Electricity Act, and advancing discussions around greater regional co-operation and integration among utilities in the Maritimes.
The government also believes it can improve NB Power’s performance measurement, staffing reviews, project management, and customer service.
But six of the recommendations won’t be acted on any time soon, or at least not until they are analyzed further. Legacy said they couldn’t be done right away because other changes had to happen first.
These are glaring omissions, considering how controversial some of them would likely be.
In the near term, the provincial government will not introduce bonuses or performance-based pay for the public utility’s employees, including its senior executive team.
Public feedback showed many New Brunswickers felt NB Power’s 2,600 workers were already well paid to do a good job.
And the province won’t immediately investigate adding more natural gas to replace electrical home heating, another hot-button issue.
There’s been a moratorium for fracking natural gas in New Brunswick for a dozen years, an environmental safeguard the Progressive Conservative opposition wants lifted to create jobs and more wealth in a habitually have-not province.
Kris Austin, the energy critic for the province’s biggest opposition party, said it was a big mistake to leave an estimated 77 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the ground.
“These recommendations, whether they do them or don’t do them, it’s very clear, are not going to reduce rates, and in the short term, I don’t even think they’re going to stabilize rates,” he told Brunswick News. “Rates are going to continue to go up.”
Austin argued a better longterm plan would have been to wean households off electrical heat, which is hugely inefficient compared to heating with natural gas. Most New Brunswickers use electrical baseboard heating.
“You’ve only got to look to the U.S. Northeast to see your answer. Electricity rates in New England are high. They’re very high, but people don’t worry too much about it because they only use electricity in the Northeast mostly to turn the lights on and, you know, for some basic stuff. They heat their homes with natural gas. So, there’s your model.”
Nor will the provincial government immediately write down the public utility’s teetering, $6-billion debt, considered far too big for a utility NB Power’s size.
The idea of spinning off the troubled Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station into a separate Crown corporation has also been put on the backburner.
David Coon, with the small opposition Green Party, blames much of NB Power’s financial problems on Lepreau, which underwent an expensive refurbishment more than a decade ago but still breaks down more than it should.
“The action plan is underwhelming,” Coon told reporters. “It’s not gonna make one bit of difference to people’s power costs whatsoever. They’re not even keeping up with what Nova Scotia is doing in terms of really being bold with helping to get people’s energy costs down through major energy efficiency programs and a major focus on solar.”
Coon said the public utility should go full-bore into offering smaller, renewable electricity, produced by wind and solar energy, backed up by powerful batteries. He said more New Brunswickers would make their homes more efficient, with heat pumps and better insulation, if they were offered no-interest loans to do the work.
NB Power’s CEO, Lori Clark, welcomed the government’s action plan.
“There are a number of key recommendations in the report that we need to move on without hesitation,” she said during an online press conference.
“While a lot of them are complicated and will require an intense level of effort, they’re required in order to modernize the utility. So, we worked with the government in terms of putting timelines together that were reasonable, and will be holding each other accountable to make sure that we can meet those timelines.”
By John Chilibeck, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on May 28, 2026 at 08:18
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