The New Brunswick government is launching an independent third-party audit into the increases in recent NB Power bills.
Premier Susan Holt, speaking with reporters on Tuesday, said hundreds, if not thousands, of people contacted MLAs about the bill increase.
“In a week, or 10 days or so, our team has received many, many messages, emails, Facebook messages, phone calls from New Brunswickers regarding the spikes they’ve seen in their electricity bills,” said Holt, during a media availability. “On Jan. 20, our caucus met with officials from NB Power to better understand what might be happening. And that conversation left us with more questions.”
People on social media platforms including TikTok and Facebook have been posting about the NB Power bills skyrocketing by hundreds of dollars, with some suggesting they’d be away on vacation during the time to kilowatt hours had increased.
“It is important for New Brunswickers to get some answers to their concerns, but it’s also important that NB Power have that information (so) they have your concerns so that they can add it to their data collection,” said Energy Minister René Legacy.
The findings from the third-party audit, Legacy said, have been asked to be ready for public accounts in February, which is scheduled for two weeks from Feb. 4 until Feb. 7 and again from Feb. 18 until Feb. 21.
“We want to get to the bottom of this,” Holt said. “We determined that an independent third-party audit would be the best way to understand what has happened and to learn about it.”
NB Power has also recently received approval for a 9.8 per cent rate high on all customers, with a variance account, bringing the total increase to about 12.7 per cent on utility rates.
The company also charges a $24 monthly service fee. In January, the Holt government introduced a 10 per cent rebate on those bills, removing the provincial sales tax.
“I think I’ve heard some people call it the perfect storm of pain for New Brunswickers,” Holt said in regards to the various increases in rate hikes customers have seen in the last year. “They’ve gone up in ways that are different from the trend, and we really need to get to the bottom of that.”
Holt said while the audit will take weeks, many customers have expressed they may be unable to pay the bills given out by NB Power.
“They have a variety of payment mechanisms, whether it’s to deliver those payments over time as we try to get to the bottom of what’s happened with this particular billing cycle,” she said.
Holt also said a cyber security threat wasn’t top of the list for things they were investigating, but didn’t totally rule it out.
“We’re going through an independent audit because we don’t want to preemptively rule anything out or rule anything in,” she said.
Legacy said NB Power is in full agreement with the need for a third-party audit.
“I think having a third party going in and either finding potentially if there’s something, if there’s an issue that they’ll clarify. If they’re not, then we can be confident that the system is sound,” he said.
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