New Brunswick premier won’t commit to staying out of power rate decisions

FREDERICTON — New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt won’t commit to letting the province’s public power utility set electricity rates without political interference — a key recommendation from an independent review her government had requested.

In an interview Tuesday, the Liberal premier pledged to overhaul the debt-saddled utility to ensure it delivers “predictable and affordable increases,” but she did not answer if she would rule out setting limits on NB Power rate applications.

Holt, however, acknowledged that government interference in rate applications helped create “this mess that we’re in with NB Power.”

“We can’t keep doing the things the way we’ve been doing them at NB Power. Our government wants to see different results,” Holt said.

After New Brunswickers faced rate hikes of nearly 20 per cent over two years, Holt in 2025 tasked three expert panellists to review the operations of the heavily indebted utility. In their report released last month, the panellists said political decisions had hindered the corporation’s ability to be financially stable and function well long term. Government-mandated rate freezes and caps between 2011 and 2022 added some $1.5 billion to the utility’s $6-billion debt, the report said.

Without giving details on her plans, Holt said her government will formally respond to the 70-page report in May. “We are prepared to take on these recommendations and then start the work of making the kind of governance and legislative and culture and structure changes that we need to.”

Kris Austin, energy critic with the Opposition Progressive Conservatives, says that government-mandate rate increases are a “Band-Aid solution,” adding that his party would back a plan that is “doable and has some teeth in it.”

The Tories would support lifting a provincial moratorium on natural gas extraction so that residents could use the resource — instead of electricity — to heat their homes. Austin acknowledged that retooling power plants for natural gas and setting up the infrastructure to get the product to homes would take time — but said long term it would stabilize rates.

“It would give homeowners over time the opportunity to heat their homes with natural gas as opposed to the need for electricity so demand would be reduced,” he said.

Austin added the Liberal government’s fiscal mismanagement has limited its options for providing short-term relief for ratepayers.

It would be “prudent” for the province to expand its 10 per cent rebate on the provincial harmonized sales tax portion of electricity bills, Austin said. But the $1.3-billion deficit makes that impossible, he added. “They’ve backed themselves into a corner in being able to actually provide help to New Brunswickers.”

Don Desserud, a political science professor at the University of Prince Edward Island, says the Holt government shouldn’t recuse itself entirely from decisions at the public utility.

“The confidence that the public has in their government is absolutely crucial,” said Desserud, who previously worked at the University of New Brunswick for two decades and has studied NB Power.

In an interview Wednesday, he said the legislature should work together on a long-term plan to avoid the time-limited patchwork solutions criticized in the expert report. Future success, he added, requires an entire restructuring of the organization rather than just change at the top or increased independence from government.

Instead, said Desserud, government oversight is crucial but needs to be carried out responsibly.

“We assume that it’s inevitable that government interferes, that government manages something, that it’s going to go badly and that’s not true, nor is it true that private industry is necessarily better at these things,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 8, 2026.

Eli Ridder, The Canadian Press