Letter to the editor
The following letter is addressed to MLA Tom Shypitka of Kootenay east.
Many of us out west here are not too happy with the federal carbon tax. The issue is particularly aggravating by a peculiar situation in the Invermere/Windermere area where a large number of residences are heated mainly with electricity.
Your staff will confirm for you that our area is one of the few in B.C. where there is no natural gas link for home heating, so the only choice here is to heat via electricity, propane or wood. Heating oil is also not an option and burning wood is much too polluting.
Given the ever increasing price of electricity, it is becoming more and more difficult for those of us with older houses heated only with electricity to make ends meet. Those of us with these older homes made the decision some 40 years ago regarding whether to go electric baseboard or propane furnace. Those who chose the latter have ducting in their residences. The rest of us do not have ducting in our homes, so switching is no longer an option.
You should know that those of us on electric heating pay anywhere from $300 to $500 per month for heating during the peak cold months of December, January and February.
By comparison, if we had natural gas or propane, I am told that we would be paying in the neighbourhood of $100 to $150 per month during those same peak heating months.
So where do we go with this dilemma? Well, Saskatchewan has come up with an interesting twist wherein they provide for a 60 per cent carbon tax relief for those homes heated exclusively with electricity.
Although the 60 per cent (amounting to some $21 per month) may be good for Saskatchewan users where electricity is generated primarily with natural gas, our power is pretty much all generated by hydro, so our carbon tax credit should be more like 100 per cent, if not even more through whatever other program might be available to us (ie the BC Electricity Affordability Credit) so that we could get down to a more reasonable peak home heating number like $200 to $300 per month.
Over the last number of years we have had considerable dialogue with BC Hydro and even the BC Utilities Board about the high cost of heating with electricity. Their response has pretty much been that there is little they can do but recommend we install heat pumps, more insulation and better windows. We have done all that and received at least some modest grants from your government in doing so, yet the costs of electrical home heating are still astronomical compared with other alternatives.
Your early attention to this issue would be greatly appreciated. I would be more than happy to share my heating costs with your staff so they can further review this matter.
Karl Adam, Windermere
