Subject: Ontario Market Opening
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 04:51:00 -0700 (PDT)

John, Rick asked me to forward the atteched to you directly. 
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 I spoke with Bill Hawkins (Premier's Office)  to day and made the following 
points: a) the messages from the Premier/Wilson are still ambiguous and 
unclear; b) we will need clarification on three questions: 1) Is May 2002 a 
deadline (as per Wilson) or a target (as per Harris)?; 2) Is the gov't still 
prepared to consider a Fall opening if the 4 conditions are met?; and 3) Is 
the return of  the first Pickering A unit a pre-condition to market opening? 
- if it is, then any question about a Fall opening is moot since the earliest 
that unit will come back is December 31, 2001 (and more likely 
later).                          I did not press Bill for answers today but 
indicated that we would need clarification on these issues as soon as 
possible to stay engaged in the way that he wants us to. I outlined the 
interpretation that we had been encouraged  by Ministry of Energy to put on 
the message.  Importantly, Bill did not "shut down" our preferred 
interpretation.                                     Bill made three points: 
a) the critical factor in the announcement was continuing concern about the 
circumstances in California and the difficulties that California presents for 
making the decision to press ahead this year;   b) on the political front, 
the key opposition to moving ahead will come from the NDP rather than the 
Liberals: he wants us to help keep the Liberals on the sidelines;  and c) the 
gov't  (Ministry of Energy) is going to work on fleshing out over the next 
several weeks how they will assess when the 4 conditions will be satisfied 
and he wanted our help in that 
process.                                             I told Bill that we 
wanted to stay engaged but that our immediate interest was getting 
appropriate clarification of the message.                        Following 
Bill's call, I heard from Joel Singer, VP at OPG, who indicated that Floyd 
Laughren had assured OPG yesterday that the OEB was still targeting a Fall 
opening in its retail readiness efforts.  Singer did indicate, however, that 
OPG's  own demand supply assessment was not  as positive as our own and that 
concerns about the demand/suppy balance was continuing to be a big hurdle to 
get over.                            The IMO is also sticking with its 
testing/commissioning timeline and is not altering it in light of the 
announcement on Monday.                          `