Cancelled sailings due to insufficient staff on major BC Ferries routes will see fines of $7,000, but some are wondering what impact that will have.
In a move to improve reliability, the province will be implementing penalties for missed sailings if there’s not enough crew, Tranportation Minister Rob Fleming said Tuesday (Oct. 3) in a news release.
“People want to know their sailings will run as scheduled. While BC Ferries is working hard to secure additional staffing, the provision for penalties is an added measure to hold the company to account for the services it is contracted to provide.”
READ MORE: BC Ferries to face penalties for missed sailings: Province
The major routes – Tswwassen-Swartz Bay, Horseshoe Bay-Nanaimo, Horseshoe Bay-Langdale and Duke Point-Tsawwassen – will seen fines of $7,000 for missed sailings, while the majority of the rest of the sailings will see fines of $1,000.
However, Northern routes – Prince Rupert-Bear Cove (Port Hardy), Prince Rupert-Skidegate and Port Hardy-Mid Coast-Bella Coola – don’t offer as many roundtrip sailings each year, but could face fines of $60,000, $34,000 and $13,000, respectively.
Details are to come in the spring on how those penalties will be applied.
But the new Coastal Ferry Services Contract, effective April 1, 2024, shows that those fines could be deducted from the routes’ transportation fee. Each route has specific funding from the government.
This year, BC Ferries has faced increased issues around cancelled sailings, out-of-service ferries and website crashes in recent months.
READ MORE: Broken-down Nanaimo-Tsawwassen ferry won’t be back in service until December
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Fleming said this past summer has been frustrating for ferry users, “and a challenge for BC Ferries given staffing and mechanical issues.”
But both the BC Greens and BC United wonder what impact the penalties will actually have.
BC Greens Adam Olsen said the lack of staffing has really caused disruptions over the last number of years. As the Saanich North and the Islands MLA, he said “BC Ferries has a big, big role to play in our communities in providing access to our communities, both for work and for people to get to their homes.”
Olsen said BC Ferries doesn’t want to be in the news constantly for the ongoing issues, so there is a lot of incentive to improve their operations.
“This fine structure is definitely going to add some weight behind that, but the conversations I’ve had with BC Ferries, it’s not like they’re trying to miss sailings or they’re trying to not achieve the contract they’ve made with the provincial government.”
It comes down to wages and training, said Olsen, adding that he asked Fleming about training programs in the spring. The training and stabilization is going to take time.
“You can only train mariners so quickly … I think that they need to take a look at the wage structure that they have for their employees. They need to become competitive with other marine operators in the space. They have fallen behind in that.”
In an emailed statement, BC Ferries said it believes that its biggest hiring spree over the last year in the company’s history – 1,206 employees with 136 of those licensed officers – and the additional focus on retention measures “positions us well to deliver on our commitments.”
For Tranportation Shadow Minister Trevor Halford, he wonders what the NDP is trying to accomplish with the penalties.
“Listen, you are subsidizing BC Ferries and then you’re taking the money out if you’re fining them, so basically you’re giving the money back to yourself. At the end of the day, what is this doing for the people that are relying on this service?”
The penalties comes as the BC Ferry Commission approved a fare price cap for the next four years, in part due to the additional one-time funding of $500 million from the provincial government.
