NDP replaces nine-tenths of Efficiency Manitoba’s Tory-appointed board

The Manitoba government has overhauled Efficiency Manitoba’s board of directors and issued a new mandate letter to the fledgling Crown corporation to renew its focus on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Nine new members have been appointed to the 10-person board now responsible for a different set of targets directed by Environment and Climate Change Minister Tracy Schmidt.

Board chair Jeannette Montufar-MacKay is the lone holdover.

“To respond to a rapidly evolving energy landscape, Efficiency Manitoba’s activities must balance important objectives related to energy affordability, sound fiscal management, and our responsibility to address climate change,” the mandate letter says.

The letter’s set of expectations include working in tandem with Manitoba Hydro to identify capacity constraints to deliver on Premier Wab Kinew’s bold energy goals.

“We think the new mandate is ambitious, it’s forward-looking,” Schmidt told the Free Press Tuesday.

In October, Kinew asked his cabinet to work toward making the province’s energy grid net zero by 2035 and to create a roadmap to meet net-zero targets by 2050.

According to the United Nations definition, net zero means cutting carbon emissions to a small amount of residual emissions that can be absorbed and durably stored by nature and other carbon dioxide-removal measures, leaving zero in the atmosphere.

In February Schmidt said the Efficiency Manitoba Act and its regulations were under review to ensure the four-year old Crown corporation can cut electricity use by 1.5 per cent annually after it missed its statutory energy-savings targets by 17 per cent for electricity and nine per cent for natural gas.

The last round of provincial targets to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, previously announced by the Progressive Conservative government, aimed to reduce emissions by roughly 27 per cent before 2027.

The board features a mosaic of business owners, municipal leaders and organization heads.

Schmidt described the new membership as a fresh perspective that could lead to more success in the long run.

“With a new government comes new priorities and a new vision,” the minister said.

Duane Nicol, the chief administrative officer for the City of Selkirk, who has long pushed for sustainability and efficiency changes at the local level, was one of the new appointees.

“The work that we’ve done in (Selkirk), I think that I can bring some lived experience from the municipal level,” Nicol said Tuesday.

The city, about 40 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, has received numerous awards and accolades for implementing strategies to fight climate change and building environmentally sustainable infrastructure.

Nicol sees the new mandate as good for both the environment and economy, adding past failures of the Crown corporation’s programs and grants means they were either misaligned with the public’s goals or hard to implement, which the CAO looks to streamline as a board member.

“If we can use the energy better, both natural gas and electricity, then we have more capacity within Manitoba to support good economic growth,” he said.

In the letter, Schmidt also extended Efficiency Manitoba’s current three-year plan to 2025-26 to allow the new board to implement a fully developed scheme.

The corporation will file its next efficiency plan with the Public Utilities Board and will present three scenarios to reduce energy consumption, including two aggressive approaches to hitting its targets.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca