Advocates Push to Ditch Gas Amid Soaring Prices in Ontario, B.C.

Mar. 13, 2025

As gas prices rise again in Ontario and British Columbia, leaving millions of Canadians at the mercy of volatile markets—and Wall Street—health and climate experts say it’s time for policymakers to break free from fossil fuels.

Ontarians will see their gas bills rise between 21% and 47% in the coming months starting April 1, reports The Toronto Star. Residential customers in the Greater Toronto Area will see the biggest increases, around C$189 extra per year, while households in Thunder Bay will take the smallest hit, around $136 more per year.

Supply Issues, Market Volatility

Ontario utility Enbridge applied for the increase in part “to recover costs associated with meeting its obligations under the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act”—that is, to recover the costs of the federal carbon tax, according to an Ontario Energy Board (OEB) rate hearing notice from November 2024.

Another factor was a reduced stored gas inventory during the winter months, reports Thunder Bay’s Northwest Ontario Newswatch, citing Enbridge’s rate hike request letter to the OEB.

The request was “based on preliminary estimates, due to the cold weather, and the storage inventory trending downwards across North America (beyond Enbridge storage),” the utility wrote in the letter.

It did not touch on the tectonic geopolitical shifts that have been driving—and continue to drive—the volatility of gas markets. “The letter makes no mention of possible tariffs,” a silence which belies the reality that Ontario imports most of its gas from the United States, writes the Star.

Nor did it mention how the combined and related impacts of ongoing geopolitical instability, especially Russia’s war with Ukraine, and record liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, are building up domestic supply bottlenecks—and associated price hikes.

“Since the reduction of Russian gas supplies to Europe, many nations have turned to LNG imports to fill the gap, creating intense competition for available cargoes,” writes OilPrice.com. LNG exports are correspondingly full throttle, with U.S. LNG exports in 2024 “averaging nearly 12 billion cubic feet per day.”

“As more U.S. natural gas is sent overseas, domestic markets face added pressure, reducing available supply and further supporting price increases,” OilPrice.com adds.

Export Markets, Downloaded Costs

The rising cost of being hooked up to international commodity markets will soon be felt by the “more than a million homes, farms, and businesses” in B.C. that depend on gas for heating and cooking, writes Kai Nagata at Dogwood. Wholesale gas prices in the province are expected to rise 113% once the Coastal GasLink pipeline comes fully online later this year, as per the recently released provincial budget [pdf].

All of this is “good news for KKR, the Wall Street private equity firm that owns a majority stake” in the pipeline, Nagata writes. Wall Street billionaires, several with strong connections to the Trump administration, are betting big on LNG in B.C.

The provincial Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions told Dogwood it “will continue to work with natural gas utilities to find ways to keep costs down for their customers,” Nagata says. But no specifics were provided.

The news of anticipated price hikes in B.C. comes just two months after the province’s monopoly gas supplier FortisBC raised its prices $14.25 per month, with much of the increase stemming from a 330% increase in “storage and transport” costs.

The company said it is “raising gas bills to pay for pipelines, including projects in the Shuswap, Kootenays, Lower Mainland, and Sunshine Coast,” with the Woodfibre LNG export terminal near Squamish the primary cause of soaring construction costs, Nagata wrote in January. Meanwhile, St. John’s-based parent company Fortis Inc. “raked in $420 million in profits last quarter, up 7% from the previous year.”’

Time to Switch Off Gas

The rising rates “offer a timely opportunity to accelerate our necessary transition away from natural gas,” family physician Melissa Lem, president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), told The Energy Mix.

“As physicians on the front lines, we witness firsthand the devastating health impacts of fossil fuel combustion—from childhood asthma exacerbations to heat-related deaths and the spread of infectious diseases due to climate change.”

Rather than vowing to find ways to buffer ratepayers from a volatile market, policymakers “should view these market signals as a catalyst” for going all in on building a more sustainable, just, healthy, and resilient economy, Lem said.

B.C. Premier David Eby’s push for LNG expansion “is not only fueling climate change, but also locking in reliance on fossil fuels for our own and other economies while forsaking a huge opportunity to pivot our province towards being a renewable energy powerhouse,” Kate McMahon of For Our Kids Burnaby told The Mix. Eby’s plans do not align with “previous commitments to protecting our children’s futures, or to make life more affordable, never mind protecting the precious ecological assets our province is lucky enough to have.”

Here, McMahon is referring not only to the climate damage caused by gas when it leaks into the atmosphere, but also to the impacts on land, air, and water that comes with fracking.