A Gulf Islander’s perspective
Photo by Raymond Wong via Unsplash.
Growing up on Saltspring Island, I have been at the mercy of BC Ferries since before I can remember.
And unfortunately, BC Ferries sucks.
I’m certainly preaching to the choir by complaining about our local aquatic transit system, but I’m not going to stop until something changes for the better. Just once it would be nice to make my way home from Victoria without stressing out about labour shortages, delays, and cancelled sailings.
I was excited as anyone to see Victoria and Saltspring in the Netflix original series Maid. What I didn’t enjoy was BC Ferries pimping out my only way home and sticking us with a much inferior vessel while they were shooting.
But then again, why would the company care at all about residents of the Gulf Islands? We’re an afterthought supplemented by the cash brought in by mainland travel.
I only keep four cards in my wallet, and taking up a quarter of that precious space is my BC Ferries Experience card. It has saved me, well, more money than I’d like to think about. This handy piece of plastic lets you travel around the Gulf Islands at reduced rates. But really, it’s just a way to charge tourists more.
The price of the ferries isn’t really the problem. To my surprise, fares haven’t increased much in the past decade (but that could possibly change very soon). The real issue is unreliability.
I’m not using these ferries to tour around the natural beauty of the islands, I’m using them to commute for work and visit my family. So you can imagine my annoyance when I show up to the terminal only to find out that my only means of transportation can’t run because they’re short a deckhand.
I’ve learned not to trust the ferries until I am unloading where I want to be. I have been burned too many times thinking I was in the clear just because I made it on the boat and departed from the terminal. If something can go wrong, inevitably it will.
Last summer, standing CEO of BC Ferries Mark Collins was fired after the company cancelled over 170 sailings in just 28 days during peak travel season.
Nicolas Jimenez was appointed the new CEO, bringing with him all his knowledge from running… ICBC? It’s hard to tell what changes he’s actually made to the company, but I just hope he’s spending his salary well.
And what’s so frustrating is that I don’t know who to be annoyed with most at the end of the day. I’m annoyed on a macro level, at the company as a whole. I’m annoyed at a micro level seeing the incompetence of the workers who fail to load a vessel correctly. And I am especially annoyed at all the tourists who have forced me to show up for a 35-minute boat ride more than an hour early.
I keep hoping that BC Ferries will return to being a government-run service, but a part of me knows that government interference is the reason why things are the way they are.
Up until 2003, BC Ferries was not a private company. In the late ‘90s, the NDP government made a decision so terrible that it even has its own Wikipedia page with a catchy name: The Fast Ferry Scandal. Instead of upgrading terminals and replacing old vessels, the brilliant idea was to build three shiny new boats named the PacifiCats. They were fully aluminum catamarans adorned with cougar graphics.
The NDP wanted to revitalize B.C.’s shipbuilding industry. This project ended up costing nearly half a billion dollars, more than double the original budget. And the worst part? These boats weren’t even very good.
They managed to do their route a whopping 15 minutes faster than the conventional ferries, but the increased wake was causing so much damage to the coastline that they weren’t even able to utilize their full speed.
After less than a year of service, the PacifiCats were retired from BC Ferries and eventually sold for under 20 million dollars. Who knows how many other facets of BC Ferries could have improved and upgraded if that money had been spent elsewhere.
What annoys me most is the fact that I can’t do anything about any of this. I could create yet another pointless petition calling for change within BC Ferries or I could boycott the company entirely and just never return home again. Even then, what would actually happen?
But hey, at least I can enjoy an overpriced beer on my way to Vancouver now.
