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11/06/2005: "It has to get worse before it gets better."

Our natural gas company (government monopoly) wanted to raise their rates 41% as a result of the drastic increase in their cost of actually purchasing the gas. This is a huge increase, but not really unfair, since their costs are going up by about the same amount, and they are already getting the gas at well below market rates due to various lock-in contracts and such that they have arranged.

Being a government run business in Saskatchewan, they have to pass their increases past a "rate review board", which makes a political decision on whether to allow the increase or not. That panel shrank the increase to 27%, thinking that would make the increase more palatable to the constituents. Well, bully for us, but we still have to pay for the gas somehow. It'll just come out of the back pocket instead of the front.

The premier, however, has rather generously decided to cap the increase at 10%. While the politics behind this is interesting in of itself, the real kicker was for him to be quoted saying that "clearly, the longer-term solution is to converve energy." How in the world can reducing an increase in energy costs have anything to do with conserving energy? If the oil crisis of 1973 should have taught us, there is no motivation to reduce consumption until it hurts us not to do so.

Of course, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.