Alberta Minister of Justice and Solicitor General Doug Schweitzer makes a statement at a news conference about the federal carbon tax in Calgary, Tuesday, Dec. 31, 2019. The federal consumer carbon tax is returning to Alberta with the new year, complete with a rebate program that Ottawa says will leave most families better off. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Todd Korol
Hatters can expect to see the federal carbon levy added to utility bills that arrive this month, but local utility administrators are assuring that only the portion related to natural gas used after midnight on Dec. 31 will be charged.
“It will depend on when the billing period ends, but because of automatic metering, we can get the reading at midnight (at month end),” said Jaret Dickie, manager of the city’s utility business support office
“Consumption is billed on what is actually used during the time period.”
Utility customers in Medicine Hat are charged on a monthly basis, but those periods often include a few days of the previous month. That means that bills for the general December time frame likely include a few days of January, and several days of the levy being charged.
That practice isn’t new.
The new charge for carbon – $1.01 per gigajoule of natural gas – comes about eight months after a similar fee was deleted.
The new line-item replaces the Alberta Carbon Levy that was set at $30 per tonne (equal to $1.54 per gigajoule), but was rescinded by the newly elected United Conservatives in May.
That led Ottawa to replace the charge with its own, including a general rebate program, which will rise to $30 per tonne in April, 2020.
As for the rebate, a family of four in Alberta will be able to claim a tax credit of $888.
At the higher levy level in 2018, the city’s department collected about $9 million, which it forwarded to the provincial government.
New utility rates
Power prices will rise slightly to a six-year high in Medicine Hat for January, while the cost of natural gas retreated from last month, according to rates announced on Thursday.
The commodity rate for electricity was set at 7.7995-cents per kilowatts hour – equal to the provincial average for customers with default rates – and gas fell to $2.267 per gigajoule, about 74 cents less than was charged in December.
The power price is the highest paid by consumers since January 2014, since which time low demand led to low pricing and more recently a cap on prices that was discontinued in late November.
The previous month’s power price in Medicine Hat was 7.75 cents.
The local natural gas rate was set at the average of prices offered across the province, including $2.259 by Direct Energy and $2.275 by AltaGas.
The Medicine Hat default power price is derived from a similar formula that averages regulated rate option price in Alberta. The high price was 8.45 cents from Epcor (Edmonton service) and the low was 7.431 from Enmax. A fixed rate option in Medicine Hat offers electricity at 6.8 cents per kilowatt hour.
The federal carbon levy, instituted on Jan. 1, 2020, will add another $1.01 per gigajoule to the total price of natural gas, which is not included in the commodity rate.
The carbon levy is not charged on electricity or fuel used to generate power. Those operations pay a separate charge on emissions they produce, called the TIER regulation, which is administered by the provincial government.
