If you have a business in Alberta, for the billing period between Nov.1/21 to the end of February/22, you will be paying for part of someone else’s past unpaid bills.
How is that fair?
The Alberta government has approved a process whereby utilities within the Province are now charging other businesses a “Deferral” amount for the debt that was incurred by the utilities for companies that elected to defer their payments last year due to COVID.
For those businesses that didn’t make it through the COVID crisis and closed their doors, there was a debt to the utilities left on their books. The Alberta government has now decreed that the utilities can apply this debt across all current customers for the next 4 months.
It’s alarming that the Alberta government expects businesses who paid their bills throughout COVID and were able to manage their cashflow properly, to now pay for a debt which was brought about by a policy which the government themselves instituted last year.
Should the government not be footing this bill?