Establish Win-Win Relationships

Our stakeholders are those who are, or could be, affected by our operations. Developing mutually beneficial relationships with our stakeholders is a key focus that is ingrained in our culture, one of our Charter values and essential for our long-term success.

Sustainability is about the way we operate our business and care for the people affected by our operations. From hundreds of stakeholder meetings that help define our project...to distributing 100,000 free energy saving kits per year to our Union Gas customers...to our annual Helping Hands in Action employee volunteer event - we listen and respond to communities across North America.

Customer Relationships
We have over 1.3 million customers, including natural gas producers, industrial, commercial, utility and retail customers. Everything we do is guided by the objective of delivering high quality products and services that our customers need.

Our customer relationships are founded on:

• a well-positioned asset base growing in response to customers’ needs,
• safe, cost-effective, reliable services tailored to meet their expectations,
• relationships based on trust, mutual respect, and open and honest communications, and
• our willingness to learn and improve by seeking feedback using one-on-one conversations and formal customer surveys

We employ strategies and metrics tailored to each of our businesses to ensure we are meeting customer expectations. In U.S. Transmission, we measure our success in customer relationships with producers and utilities through our contract renewal rate.

In Union Gas, where we have many industrial, commercial, and retail customers, we measure our success through our ability to resolve customer issues on the first phone call. In western Canada, we measure and monitor availability at our gas gathering and processing and extraction plants. We are implementing targets and programs to continuously improve in these areas, with the goal of being the supplier of choice.

Working with Regulators
Regulatory agencies (state, provincial, and federal) oversee fundamental aspects of our business, including: facility site selection and construction, tariffs, access to markets and customers, and procedures for maintaining supply to customers. Understanding regulators’ expectations and building positive, constructive relationships with them is very important. Our relationships help us understand market dynamics and prevent delays in major projects.

In working with regulators, we seek to:

• serve as respected advisors on issues of importance to our industry and regulators,
• improve the quality and value of services for our customers,
• achieve fair and equitable rate settlements that provide stability and certainty for our customers and our shareholders, and
• ensure the safety of the public at large.

Our approach with regulators has enabled a number of win-win outcomes.

• Our western Canadian operations have achieved more than a decade of collaborative rate settlements with customers.
• In Union Gas, we work closely with the Ontario Energy Board in demand side management programs that benefit citizens of Ontario, our customers and our business.
• In the U.S., we have worked with industry and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to implement the pipeline integrity rule, allowing pipelines to operate at increased pressures while adhering to stringent safety requirements.