About

As the youngest senior executive and general counsel in Toronto Hydro’s history, Amanda Klein leads a team of nearly 40 lawyers and other professionals through the company’s most contentious cases, significant transactions and complex stakeholder relationships. Toronto Hydro is the owner and operator of the electricity distribution system in Canada’s largest city. With an asset base valued at over C$3bn, it distributes approximately one fifth of the electricity consumed in Ontario and serves a growing city of nearly three million people. Toronto Hydro’s equity is owned by the City of Toronto, its debt is publicly traded, and as a natural monopoly its prices are set by a provincial regulator. It is within these highly technical and complex conditions that Klein’s team has been at the helm of a number of significant matters including, legal leadership of the company’s financing transactions, which are crucial to the success of its large infrastructure programmes. This includes the successful filing of two base shelf prospectuses for senior unsecured debentures worth C$2bn combined, and multiple debenture offerings worth C$645m combined. Further projects include delivering extensions and increases to Toronto Hydro’s credit facilities and C$800m commercial paper program, as well as a C$250m equity subscription by the City. Notably, the team achieved Toronto Hydro’s highly-successful, precedent-setting application for 2015-2019 electricity rates before the Ontario Energy Board. This application was the first successfully adjudicated case under a complex and untested policy framework, and resulted in C$3bn of needed funding for Toronto Hydro’s operations. This included C$2bn for capital investment needed to improve the safety and reliability of the grid and support growth in the city. Regarding this, one nominator identified that, ‘the outcome has been described as “ground breaking” for the industry and regulatory policy more generally’.