This resource calls for the Ontario government and law enforcement to end the ESA's monopoly, cut fees across the board.

Limit its absolute power. Investigate and stop the alleged criminal abuse of that power and unjust self-enrichment.

Expose fundamental flaws that deteriorate safety causing more accidents, fires, and fatalities.

Goals


Goals of this resource are simple:

End ESA monopoly, cut fees across the board

Stop the abuse. Demand fair treatment for all and ALWAYS

Expose fundamental flaws that make further safety improvements impossible

Demand Government action to launch an exhaustive audit of the ESA's residential regulations and its:
  1. performance
  2. effectiveness
  3. necessity of the three licenses and licensing fees for highly experienced self-employed residential electricians
  4. necessity of charging extremely high inspection fees for the rudimentary work done by the highly experienced self-employed residential electricians
  5. deteriorating safety, dangerous or deadly outcome of the ESA's extremely high fees
  6. investigate ESA executives for possible abuse of power and/or alleged crimes of collecting unnecessary fees with a single purpose of assigning huge pay packages to themselves
  7. do tens or hundreds of millions of dollars paid to ESA and OCOT executives since 2006 commensurate with the residential safety improvements?
  8. what do we pay them for? What do the ESA executives do except for getting huge wages, comprehensive benefits, and finding new, clever legal ways to part us from our hard earned money?
  9. since 2006 residential electrical licensing fees increased 35 fold or so. Inspection fees increased too. Has the residential electrical safety improved as much? Or by how much? A formal investigation is necessary. Better technology, science, engineering, safer products, better designs, and many other things improve the safety. But they have nothing to do with the ESA. What if safety improves not because but despite the MGCS/ESA?
  10. Ontarians want transparency in everything! Access to information is one of the keys to democracy. Openness serves as a critical tool for fighting abuse of power, crime, making governments more efficient. Ignoring some questions entirely, and refusing to answer others is or could be a sign of abuse of power, injustice, wrongdoing, conspiracy or crime.
  11. we want to see charts of ESA gross and net income in the last 15 years.
  12. tables and charts of profits, number of employees, and labour-related costs, salary, wages, benefits, pension and all other post-employment benefits separately for last 15 years.
  13. tables and charts separately for 30 top executives displaying every dollar each of them received separately for last 15 years.
  14. separately for accidents, injuries, fatalities, etc. with and without moving averages, free of lies and fraudulent conclusions.
  15. various sources of fee revenue, together and separately.
  16. tables and charts separately for residential, commercial and industrial sectors. Separately for new construction sector. And for repair, renovation, maintenance sector.
  17. we want to see more tables and charts. For example, we would like to be able to compare at a glance whether ESA's residential repair and renovation fee revenue correlates with accident rate in that sector.
  18. we want to see annual charts and compare how OCOT's and ESA's fees increased 35 fold or so since 2006 reduced fire and fatality rates in the province.

Force the ESA to:

improve and restructure

prevent electrical accidents and fires

protect customers, electrical workers, all Ontarians

boost safety, cut the volume and risk of defective work

show new ways to prevent electrical incidents or harms from occurring

gather and give advice and guidance from the communities and electrical workers

achieve sustainable safety improvements and "getting to zero" fatalities and serious injury

achieve the long-term vision of an Ontario free of electrical fatalities, serious injury, damage, and loss



This site represents views, opinions, feelings of several small residential electrical contractors and electricians in Ontario. As our numbers grow we will get more influence. Everyone who was abused or overcharged can participate or join. We will display the number of supporters after it hits 20. When there are hundreds of us we will take ESA to court.

We need your support, feedback, comments.
Please spread the word or link to us.

Do you think the following points could be true?

ESA is a monopoly in two ways.

Firstly, it abuses its unlimited power when the ESA acts as a regulator, enforcer, investigator, prosecutor, judge, and often as the offender (abuser of power). It participates in a lawmaking process passing favorable for itself legislation. Moreover, ESA has financial power to impose fees or penalties on, and collect fines from electrical workers. Then ESA lavishly compensates its top management. And if you do not like any of that, ESA pays lawyers to persecute you using your own money.

Secondly, it has no competitors, inflates rates and fees, causes many other troubles.

End the monopoly and most of its typical problems will be solved automatically.

Self-enrichment is now the biggest priority of the ESA executives. It must be replaced with the rule of law, common sense, logic, fair treatment of customers, workers, all other participants and stakeholders.

Stop the abuse. Make a fundamental change from "the ESA is always right" and "ESA is king" to "the public and electrical workers are the king" and "public and electrical workers are always right". The ultimate decision making power should belong to the public.

Eliminate ESA monopoly. Split it into three or four smaller private companies. So that they compete for business, cut fat, fight inefficiencies.

Allow other contenders to enter the field and introduce the competitiveness, reduce fees and fix all other classic problems caused by the monopoly.

Abolish Ontario Regulation 89/99 designating ESA as the sole administrative authority.



Restructure! Adopt an aggressive outsourcing and subcontracting out plan. Hire independent self-employed individuals, contractors and firms, like work from home telephone receptionists, CSRs, inspectors, investigators, etc. Make them compete with each other. Charge them fees, where possible, the same way ESA now charges electrical contractors.

Cut employee payroll by 70%.

Bring ESA salaries, wages, employment benefits, pensions and post-employment benefits, allowances and reimbursements, vehicle and overtime compensation, etc. and total all inclusive incomes of ESA staff in line with the average incomes of corresponding occupations in Ontario.

Implement a complete data transparency. Make executives' income public. Don't forget to include and list all items from the above paragraph.

Stop paying ESA staff 20% to 200% more just because the ESA has and abuses the power to overcharge, expropriate, or legally steal money from the contractors and public.



ESA must stop magnifying successes and masking failures with various tricks in its reports.



Do you think ESA CEO, senior management and the board should all be fired after paying from their salaries, savings and pensions all the extra money collected illegally back to electrical contractors? Should ESA refund all the unnecessary fees that residential master electricians, contractors and others paid since 2006?

Should we petition the Attorney General to conduct a comprehensive audit or investigation of the ESA senior management? Are executives openly channeling funds to their high salaries, wages, employment benefits, pensions and post-employment benefits, allowances and reimbursements? Even if paying high salaries to themselves is now publicized, could it still be a misappropriation of funds or embezzlement? Could it be an injustice protected by the bad law, legalized robbery, abuse of power? Could it be a crime?




Small residential companies with five employees or less comprise 60% or more of all electrical contractors. But we are NOT equally represented in all branches of power. We must have at least 60% of dedicated pro-small-contractor fighters in the decision making process, including ESA senior management and board of directors, and in ECAO, ECRA and CoAC. In fact, we must have our own fully independent association representing only small electrical contractors (ISB).

We, small residential electrical contractors shall have the real, actual, dominant power in the ESA decision making process at all levels. And so shall other industry sectors, customers and stakeholders.



- ESA, cut the number of licences for small residential electrical contractors from three to one. Eliminate licensing and fee redundancies with the Ontario College of Trades.

- Run a pilot project allowing 50 or so licensed and highly experienced electricians to do residential electrical work without master and electrical contractor licenses. But with mandatory liability insurance. Make sure their work is inspected and evaluated without bias. Compare their safety record and performance to electrical contractors with three licenses.

- Run a pilot project allowing 50 or so small electrical contractors to do residential electrical work but do not charge them unnecessary master's and contractor's fees. Make sure their work is inspected and evaluated without bias. Compare their safety record and performance to electrical contractors with three licenses.

- Run a pilot project to replace four bureaucracies with one entity consolidating functions of: OCOT, ESA, WSIB, Liability Insurance, etc. Or create an app, webpage, a single entity, or a private independent firm consolidating multiple bureaucracies or services into one. Ontarians expect good, logical, useful, convenient, beneficial, time and money saving services from government and regulators. Instead of the exact opposite that we are getting now.

- ESA and local Hydro companies, work together and allow electrical contractors to extract the meter in order to cut the power and allow put it back. Complications, difficulties and prohibitions in disconnecting and reconnecting power are causing huge delays, expenses and risks for both the public and contractors. If it is necessary to improve safety, organize simple training courses and make electrical contractors pass the meter removal safety exam.

- Small, low revenue electrical contractors should pay lower licensing fees.

- ESA shall collect inspection fees directly from customers, NOT from electrical contractors.

- ESA must acknowledge that today 90% or more of small residential and commercial electrical work is done underground and goes uninspected. This is a huge safety risk, a humongous ESA failure and/or a crime.

- ESA must find ways and bring this unreported part of the market up to the surface.

- Drastically lower ESA fees across the board. Introduce shifts, extend regular working hours, and charge regular inspection rates from 8 am to 3 am.

- Cancel unnecessary inspections for rudimentary and mundane work in homes like light fixture, wall plug or switch new installation, basic wiring, etc. performed by licensed personnel.

- Make people pay much less for inspections. Make all of us want to do all the work legally. Make the uninspected, underground work unattractive and pointless to everybody by drastically lowering the inspection fees.

- Ontarians will be much safer if 89% of small jobs get inspected at a cost of $5 each, than just 5% at the cost of $89 each!



There is an Authorized Contractor Program (ACP) that simplifies and reduces the number and cost of inspections for some types of work.

The ACP should be instantly and greatly widened. Other similar programs must be implemented to include and control most of electrical work that is hidden and uninspected today.

This would greatly increase the volume of work reported to the ESA, holding electrical workers responsible for doing it right and safe. The ESA would still randomly inspect as many jobs as necessary and control a much larger portion of the work undisclosed today.

Programs like ACP could require more work. But the need for improving the ESA's speed, efficiency, and the necessity to start working hard to earn their huge salaries and comprehensive benefits is long overdue.

Ontarians will do inspections only if passing them becomes more affordable, beneficial, and safe than skipping! But is ESA, in its present state, capable of achieving that?



- We should petition the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario to conduct a comprehensive audit evaluating management's wages against their ability and performance in running the business and improving public safety, among other things?

- These three bodies ISB, ECAO, CoAC should whip ESA with another audit. ESA should pay for it.

- The Electrical Safety Authority shall ban everybody who is clueless, inexperienced, incapable, not qualified and not licensed to do safe electrical work in Ontario! No exceptions. No exemptions.

- Inspectors should pay a substantial penalty for being late and compensate contractors for not showing up for scheduled appointment.

- There is only one way to restore justice and defeat ESA, a terribly powerful monster. It should be made free and easy to sue the ESA for bad things and crimes. And it should be free and easy to defend yourself from abuse. The ESA must always cover and reimburse all legal expenses to those who paid the fees to the ESA before.

- The ISB, ECAO, and CoAC, must be formally allowed to conduct ongoing surveys, referendums, opinion polling and have access to ESA databases and internal information.

- An interactive online public board for questions, complaints, and ESA answers should be created ASAP, offering every asker, critic, applicant, or complainant to post even a tiny matter and get an answer in five business days. This would quickly level the playing field and stop the abuse.

- Broad-based discussions with representatives of all groups and general public must now become the norm.

- A transparent good-faith negotiations, cooperation, fair treatment, and avoidance of discrimination should become a reality.

All the above must be reflected in the Act, regulations, ESA corporate governance, Administrative Agreement, and other documents.


Post a Comment


ESA will never give up fantastic salaries and huge benefits until we refuse to be their cash cows. They will milk us all dry if YOU and I don't stop them in court. So how committed are you to winning?

No anonymous comments!
Use full name, real or not. No links unless devoted to fighting ESA.

If emailing evidence of overcharge, abuse, or crime, clearly state whether we can make your name and material public.

Otherwise we will keep all your contact and personal information strictly confidential and unknown to the ESA. Courts will give you absolute immunity, witness protection, and concealed identity in advance. ESA will never know who you are and won't be able to retaliate.





ISB - Independent Supervisory Body. We should create it in order to fight for what is just, fair and right

ECAO - Electrical Contractors Association of Ontario

CoAC - Contractor Advisory Council

OESC - Ontario Electrical Safety Code