Policy approaches to fuel poverty

Making electricity affordable for low-income families

While First Nations and remote communities have a higher incidence of fuel poverty in Ontario, they are not the only at-risk segment in the population of 12.8 million.

For the past ten years, the Low Income Energy Network (LIEN) has been advocating for a comprehensive approach for affordable energy. Most recently, they successfully lobbied for an ongoing rate assistance subsidy called the Ontario Electricity Support Program (OESP), which was launched 1 January 2016.

No exact figures are available for how many low-income households in Ontario have energy bills that put them into a state of fuel poverty, says Mary Todorow, a research/policy analyst and a member of LIEN. But some information can be gleaned from other records. 

β€œIn their costing for the OESP, the Ontario Energy Board (OEB) estimated that 790 375 households in Ontario are living at or below the Statistics Canada after-tax Low-Income Measure (LIM). Of that, about 571 072 are eligible for the OESP benefit," says Todorow. "So that's over half a million households.”

Interestingly, in contrast to the standard European fuel poverty measure of energy bills accounting for 10% (or more) of household income, LIEN defines unaffordable energy as a much lower 6% to 8%.