Should BC Ferries buy ships from BC?
Posted in Politics on July 30th, 2004 by Sacha Peter
BC Ferries was brought into existence in 1959 by the provincial government to ensure reliable service between Vancouver and Victoria. Five years later, they built such vessels as the Queen of Saanich, Queen of New Westminster, Queen of Vancouver and 7 other ships which are currently in operation. There were a couple more ships built in the early 1980′s and two more ships in the early 1990′s, but otherwise most of BC Ferries’ fleet is old and is running into age-related problems. Most of the traffic volume on BC Ferries is between Vancouver to Victoria and Nanaimo and there is a need for ferries that can load/unload fast, travel fast, be inexpensive to build and operate and perform all of this safely.
Fast forward into the mid 1990′s and the Fast Ferries were built to requirements that were not to BC Ferries’ needs. Specifically, the fast ferries were overwhelmingly expensive and did not deliver the speed gains originally anticipated. A description of the actual ships can be found here, and the auditor general’s report on what went wrong is here. The project was somewhat politically motivated – the then ruling NDP government wanted to start a shipbuilding industry in the province and use the fast ferries as an example to showcase BC’s ship-building abilities to the rest of the world.
BC Ferries then spent $460M on a project that was projected to cost $210M (the taxpayers eventually chewed up the bill), but more importantly, these ferries were supposed to have replaced the ferries that were built in the early 1960′s. This didn’t happen, and this did not alleviate BC Ferries of the fact that they still have to purchase new ships to replace the 40-year old vessels. Imagine if you were driving an automobile that was 40 years old – the naval analogy is equally true. BC Ferries still needs to build new ships for the Vancouver to Nanaimo route.
There has been a lot of commotion lately in the press that BC Ferries has not included local BC shipyards in a pending bid to purchase two or three new ferries. The corporation was expected to contract out that work to some shipyards in Europe and the unions are screaming about how money is leaving the province and how BC will lose 2000 jobs and other such screaming we’ve heard in the past (e.g. healthcare will grind to a halt when the nurses went on strike, the roads grinding to a halt when Translink bus drivers went on strike, etc.).
As much as I would like to see those jobs and industry stay inside the province, if BC Ferries can get a better deal out of the country, they should choose to do so. If the ferries are built inside the province for a more expensive price, effectively the public is subsidizing the shipbuilding industry. Do we really want to do that? The last subsidy that we gave them with the Fast Ferries failed to sustain their industry. Apparently the capacity of the shipyards in BC are at 20% of what they used to be. Could this perhaps be because our shipyards are not as competitive as our international competition?
I’m also of the opinion that people are speaking about this issue without enough information to correctly make factual statements. We do not know the parameters of what the bid is about, and I’m not in a very good position to assess the potential of the BC shipbuilding industry. Until more information is dug up on exactly what the requirements are for BC Ferries, it’s difficult to say whether the province has any moral interest in ensuring the ships get built here.
I do highly suspect, however, that our provincial government knows that they’re not going to get any votes from people that are directly affected by this issue, so they don’t have much to lose if union jobs are not created in this province. I seriously doubt that the unions will be voting for anybody but the NDP in any provincial election, no matter how well things go for them.