{"id":20099,"date":"2016-04-20T14:23:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-20T19:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20099"},"modified":"2016-04-20T14:23:00","modified_gmt":"2016-04-20T19:23:00","slug":"govt-using-misleading-accounting-at-bc-hydro-charges-dix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20099","title":{"rendered":"Gov’t Using Misleading Accounting at BC Hydro, Charges Dix"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gov’t Using Misleading Accounting at BC Hydro, Charges Dix<\/a><\/h3>\n

Minister counters that ‘rate-smoothing’ accounts make sense due to 10-year plan for rate increases.<\/p>\n

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BC Hydro transmission tower on Mt. Seymour. Photo by\u00a0agaumont<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0Your BC: The Tyee’s Photo Pool<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The British Columbia government has chosen to use misleading accounting at BC Hydro to fudge the province’s finances ahead of the 2017 election, charges NDP energy critic Adrian Dix.<\/p>\n

“They misled people about the state of B.C.’s finances, and they misled people about the state of BC Hydro’s finances,” said Dix, the MLA for Vancouver-Kingsway, in an interview. “This will affect every single person in the province.”<\/p>\n

In particular, he said, the government is using “rate smoothing” or “rate stabilization” accounts to move up about $1 billion in revenue that the Crown utility won’t actually receive from ratepayers until after 2021 so that it is included as income for earlier years.<\/p>\n

The accounting trick lets the government continue to take money out of the utility to help balance its own books, Dix said.<\/p>\n

“We’re borrowing against nothing here,” he said. “This is a pure attempt to mislead people about the state of the province’s finances.”<\/p>\n

A table from a March 30 BC Hydro presentation shows the practice peaks in 2017, which happens to be the same year as the next provincial election.<\/p>\n

That year, BC Hydro will draw down $250 million from a rate-smoothing account, money that it doesn’t plan to finish repaying until\u00a02024.<\/div>\n

For context, the provincial government has budgeted an overall surplus of $287 million in 2017-2018, which in part depends on receiving $706 million from BC Hydro.<\/p>\n

The rate-smoothing money is therefore more than one-third of the amount the government plans to take from the utility in the election year.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gov’t Using Misleading Accounting at BC Hydro, Charges Dix Minister counters that ‘rate-smoothing’ accounts make sense due to 10-year plan for rate increases. BC Hydro transmission tower on Mt. Seymour. Photo by\u00a0agaumont\u00a0from\u00a0Your BC: The Tyee’s Photo Pool. The British Columbia government has chosen to use misleading accounting at BC Hydro to fudge the province’s finances […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,6],"tags":[11645,7724,94,103,13576,9341],"class_list":["post-20099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-liberty","tag-andrew-macleod","tag-bc-hydro","tag-british-columbia","tag-canada","tag-rate-smoothing","tag-the-type"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20099"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20100,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20099\/revisions\/20100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}