The leader of Toronto Hydro’s unionized workers says he’ll fight any move to lay off his members at the city-owned utility.

Toronto Hydro has axed contractors employing between 700 and 1,000 workers after receiving a stinging rebuke from the Ontario Energy Board.

And the company says that hundreds of permanent staffers – as much as 20 per cent of its workforce of 1,700 – will be told soon that their jobs, too, will disappear.

John Camilleri, who heads CUPE Local One at Toronto Hydro, said Wednesday that’s not acceptable.

“It’s my expectation that no staff at Toronto Hydro be laid off,” Camilleri said in an interview.

“There’s a lot of work to be done, and there has to be some compromise where 1,000 people don’t lose their jobs.”

Camilleri said he has seen underground hydro vaults with concrete crumbling off the roof, and other instances where existing facilities are no longer capable of serving rising demand.

Camilleri said it’s up to the province to resolve the current conflict between the energy board, which regulates rates, and Toronto Hydro. The province can issue policy directives to the energy board.

Toronto Hydro owns the wires that carry electricity directly to homes and businesses in Toronto.

The dramatic cuts come after the energy board signaled that it won’t give Toronto Hydro anything close to the $500 million a year in extra revenue it says it needs for each of the next three years to mend its aging system.

A spokesperson for a group representing electrical contractors and unions said the cutbacks will have a direct effect on reliable power service.

“It won’t be long before we face power outages, longer and more frequent,” said Giselle Matin, spokesperson for the group called Keep the Lights On.

Martin said that 850 to 1,000 employees will be let go in the near term by contractors working on projects to upgrade the city’s aging power grid.

Blair Peberdy, vice president of Toronto Hydro, estimated that 700 to 900 contract workers will lose their jobs.

“We’ve started the process of right-sizing, or down-sizing the company to meet the approved amount,” Peberdy said in an interview.

Contractors already have the bad news, he said. But it won’t stop there.

“The impacts will start to hit Toronto Hydro’s own workforce shortly,” he added.

No final decisions have been made on the staffing cuts required, he said, but “it could be up to a 20 per cent reduction.”

That would be 340 layoffs of hydro staff. One source said layoff announcements could come as early as Thursday.

All the jobs being lost are on projects that Toronto Hydro has on its books to renew aging equipment.

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The company says it needs to spend heavily in coming years because its equipment isn’t as reliable as it should be. Much of it was installed in suburban areas during the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, the company says. It’s now half a century old, and beyond its normal life expectancy.

Some of the renewal work is being done by Toronto Hydro crews, and some by contract firms.

The company had warned the energy board that failure to grant it a significant rate increase would leave it short of money, forcing it to scrap much of its renewal program.

Chief executive Anthony Haines had told the board that failing to get the rate the company was seeking would put it in “survival mode.”

Toronto Hydro “would be in the position of having an insufficient workforce and few-to-no contractors to do the capital work required,” Haines had told the board.

As a result, “the distribution system would be maintained at unacceptable service levels.”

The energy board, which regulates the rates of local hydro utilities, last week dismissed the company’s depiction of a rapidly deteriorating system as “not sufficiently credible.”

The board said Toronto Hydro has failed to demonstrate that its service is eroding, and criticized it for failing to make productivity improvements.

The board pegged Toronto Hydro’s rate increase to a formula that will give the company an additional $140 million a year in revenue. The company had said it needs $500 to $600 million a year, costing a typical household an extra $5 a month.

The energy board told Toronto Hydro it can re-apply for extra money if it’s needed.

But that’s a lengthy process, and early this week Toronto Hydro began to cancel contracts.

Both Peberdy and Matin warned that the workers being lost are highly skilled and mobile. That means they can look for jobs outside Ontario, and won’t be easy to get back if they do leave.