Hydro signs up customer without his permission

Cranky service representatives give complainer the runaround

Ottawa Citizen - October 13, 2002
by Tony Coté

I signed nothing that gives Ontario Hydro the right to sell me electricity in our new regime of deregulation yet getting someone from the utility to acknowledge that has been impossible.

In April, I received a letter from Ontario Hydro Energy thanking me for choosing it as my energy supplier. The letter explained the details of the deal and quoted me an electricity price of 5.65 cents a kilowatt hour.

The letter came as a shock to me as I had not signed any agreement with any retailer.

I called the customer service centre at Ontario Hydro Energy and explained that I hadn't signed anything and wondered how they got my name and address. The representative I spoke to took down the information and my question and then searched the company's database. My name wasn't there.

The representative said she would pass the information on to a supervisor who, she said, would investigate and get back to me. When he didn't call me back, I called him. He was far from pleasant when I reached him and seemed more interested in finding out who gave me his name and number than in helping sort out my problem.

He eventually got down to asking some questions and recording some answers, then advised me he was unable too find me in the company's database. He promised to find out what was going and get back to me in 10 days.

In the meantime, I got another correctly addressed letter from Ontario Hydro. It, like the first one, thanked me for choosing it and assigned me an account number. I didn't hear a thing from the supervisor.

I was forced to call the customer service office again and got a representative who was quite rude and wouldn't let me speak to a supervisor. She took down the details, the third time that it had been done, and after searching the database without results, like the others, promised to have a supervisor contact me.

A short time later she called me back and asked me to fax the letters to her. I did.

It's some two weeks later and I am still waiting for that supervisor to get back to me.

If this is how Ontario Hydro Energy is going to conduct business I feel very sorry for those who signed a contract with them.

I would like this sorted out but just asking to have my name removed from its lists doesn't make much sense because they claim not to have me there anyway.

Robert Gallant,
Orleans

You are not an Ontario Hydro Energy customer nor have you ever been one.

How and why you get those letters aren't known and probably won't because the two letters came before and after the company exchanged ownership hands.

The first letter was sent when the company was owned by Hydro One.

Three days after it was sent Ontario Hydro Energy was sold to Union Energy. The second letter was sent under its stewardship.

Mike Andrews, a senior vice-president with Union Energy, explained that, when the changeover occurred, his company picked up the electricity and natural gas marketing divisions and the hot water heater contracts. Union Energy also got the paperwork that went with those arms.

"In some cases, we found incomplete records in the acquired lists including customer names without valid contract information," he said. It appears that you fell into that hole.

"In summary, we sought to do everything we could to smooth the almost inevitable bumps in such a large scale change of ownership and to ensure the accuracy of the customer data we had acquired." Mr. Andrews said. "Unfortunately, in a few instances we fell short of our service expectations."

If there is any consolation, Mr. Andrews said that a thorough search of the records, both electronic and paper, brought no mention of you as a customer.

"We will, of course, ensure that he does not receive any further correspondence from Ontario Hydro Energy regarding an energy retail account with our organization," the vice-president said.

"Most importantly, he has not been billed by Union Energy nor will he be billed for anything unless he chooses to become a customer at some point in the future."

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