Shelter, food, water and energy are essentials to life

August 18, 2016

On Aug. 2, residents from the Bancroft area met at the park on Woodview Lane with CHEX TV to discuss rising costs of hydro issues. It was made abundantly clear there are many residents and cottagers hurting from high delivery costs and increases. We are fed up with Hydro One’s profit-first agenda.

Shelter, food, water and energy are essentials to life and should not be privatized or denied at any time. When senior citizens, working families with kids, working poor, disabled, impoverished and small businesses are loosing their limited life quality while great profits are made is wrong, we need to turn to all of the people to break away from corporate grip and help ourselves. That LEAP decrease gimmick is given back to Hydro One in the increases we’ve let them get away with. Nothing is gained – except citizens’ personal info. Who has your info when it goes private? Why do we pay so much? H.O. claims it looses profit bringing us hydro and no matter what, this public service will continue to gain huge profits while we pay for their estimated losses.

Urban areas are not unhappy as their delivery costs are minimal. That retirement fund hydro charged us was only supposed to go on for 3 years but was more than 20. “Smart” meters are increasing our bills, emitting radiation and causing people to get sick. They have to be removed. Rural citizens are hurting because of hydro costs and “Smart” meters. That has to change.

The energy ombudsman needs to put together a non-partisan team to see how Hydro One justifies: forcing costs on customers for services we said ‘no’ to; pay for their delivery losses; further increases; obscene salaries of board members, making us sick and hook up charges. How has Hydro One been given the power to cut essentials when the people are obviously in dire straights? How have we let that go on instead of fixing the root cause – poverty and governments not intervening?

Glenn Thibeault of the Ontario Energy Board says ‘Crisis? There’s no crisis!’ When around 60,000 Ontario residents were denied basic human rights to heat, run medical equipment, cooked food or running water this year because of poverty, that IS a crisis. The board needs to be replaced with forward-thinking rural residents. Any salaries in the millions of dollars through profits by publicly-owned service board members is perverse to my thinking.

We have a constantly running source of currents running through the middle of Bancroft: York River.

Those who control the energy, food, shelter, water and media, control the people.

There’s no questioning the need for change. We need to speed it up. Messages to our Ombudsman, Prime Minister, Premier, MPs and MPPs supporting investigations and change wouldn’t hurt.

Sharon McCullough, Bancroft