What Islanders need to know about the final report into IRAC

The final review report into the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission is now complete, and at its core, the main message remains the same. IRAC should be split into two new regulatory bodies. Even ahead of the final report, the province announced it would be moving to dismantle the organization, and today says legislation to begin that process will be tabled in the fall sitting, which, of course, begins tomorrow. Rory Francis is the review commissioner, and he's my guest tonight in studio. Whew, you're done. Let's talk about some of the changes that were made between the interim report and the final report. You've received 29 feedback submissions and you did refine some recommendations and there are some new ones. What are the highlights there? In terms of sort of what's new. I suppose two recommendations or two areas that we knew we had work to do before the interim report on the electricity regulatory side of things and some more work to do on the Lands Protection Act side. After the interim report, the CEO of IRAC said she was disappointed her office was not given an opportunity to provide some feedback and to see some of the recommendations ahead of that. Did they see a final draft before it was released? About. 24 hours, 48 hours before, you know, and that's fine. The, of course, they did, Iraq did do quite a comprehensive response. So they did have the opportunity. That's what the interim report was all about. They had an opportunity to respond fully to any points they wanted clarified and made some very good points of clarification, which we took into consideration. So I think I think that worked out fine. Okay. The main recommendation, as I mentioned off the top, you the core of this is really restructuring very IRAC into two separate specialized bodies. much How do you ensure that this is not just a simply a reshuffling of the same regulatory for system? Yeah. Um... your Well, I think the devil is always in the details. The time. Come down to, I hope, the clarity of what we've recommended, the very specific aspects you of the operational side of both the Energy and Utilities Board. very Which will be a regulatory board and the land and appeals board which will be an appeals board and just the fact that they much. are they're different because appeals processes are different from regulatory processes there will be specialization in each and the hearing process in each will have its own specific mechanisms. I do want to talk about the recommendation to create an office of the independent consumer advocate. How will that, or how do you envision that will operate? So the individual in that role, assuming it's one individual as we expect, their role is My goal is really to be able to reach out to those groups in... ...community that they represent, underrepresented small business, and understand what this particular upcoming hearing, because this is all in the context of an application that's coming in front of the regulatory board, and the consumer advocate will then be prepared through the conversations with... Community organizations, for example, be able to take those concerns and those issues forward to be a formal representative and intervener at hearings. So that's their chief role. So it really is in the voice of the people. Voice of the people that don't, you know, are the larger players, if you will, larger users. Electricity, for example, tend to represent themselves. They have their own representation, their own data collection and so on. And the Consumer Advocate Office will also hopefully have the ability, if they need to, have a specialist with them, depending on their own background, a specialist to assist in putting together that intervention that they would be making, they would be able to do that. How will the proposed changes ensure there is more transparency on controversial land purchases? That has been a big one. Yeah, that was a new recommendation. And I came to that conclusion after there's... There's much more work in the Lands file than probably I expected when we started this exercise. There will be a Recommendations are followed a lot less applications because the businesses who are at a five-acre plus level of land ownership would not have to apply only when their holdings get quite high, which is what the whole Lands Protection Act is about with regard to corporate land ownership. So that 60-65% of applications would disappear. So, what it means is that Cabinet will be seeing a lot less, there can be more concentration on really two things. One, on the enforcement of the Lands Protection Act in terms of corporate land ownership, and secondly, focus on non-resident purchase of land, which is the other purpose of the Lands Protection Act. Given that, and given smaller numbers and more efficiency in the whole exercise, and given the alignment that we saw between recommendations that came from IRAC to Executive Council, the Cabinet, upon which Cabinet makes its decision, There are no surprises here. So with some appropriate regulation, there's no reason Cabinet, we're not recommending a change in who makes the decision. Cabinet can make the decision, but Cabinet can also do more than just issue an order in Council that says you're approved, you're denied. You're approved and here's why, you're denied and here's why. So some better communication back to the applicants, so more transparency in that regard. I think it comes down to that, right, as Islanders fill in the gaps. With the information they don't have, which can be very dangerous. So is your role over now in this process, or will you be overseeing any implementation? Well, at this stage, this is the end of this process. What happens from here, we'll see. Maybe there's some clarifications required or interpretation, but at this stage... All right, well, congratulations, and I know it's online. People can read it for themselves, the entire document. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Leslie.