The Crisis at BC Ferries

By breakfast time on Wednesday, BC Ferries was already warning that anyone wanting to drive onto a ferry on the route between Victoria and Vancouver without a reservation would be out of luck until the 9 p.m. sailing that night.

The jam was due to a staffing shortage that had unexpectedly caused cancelled sailings. As passengers who had paid $18 for reservations on the cancelled sailings were shifted onto other sailings, which were already heavily reserved, ferries filled up quickly.

The company’s website warned that drive-up space would be scarce and encouraged people without a confirmed booking to instead consider travelling as a foot passenger or via the terminal in Nanaimo, a 137-kilometre drive from the one at Swartz Bay.

The situation resolved later in the day as the ferry company found the needed staff and added sailings, but it was a further sign that for anyone wanting to be sure to catch a ferry on the major routes — even mid-week in the slow season — paying the extra $18 fee for a reservation has largely become essential.

On some sailings in July when the company faced similar capacity problems, recently released BC Ferries documents show as much as 95 per cent of deck space was reserved.

That’s more than the company says publicly is open for reservations on the route and more than double the 40 per cent that was to be the maximum open for booking when it introduced the reservation system 25 years ago.

The lack of space for travellers without reservations is a concern, said Transportation Minister Rob Fleming. “If they have data they’re sharing now that shows they are getting that close to an all-reservation system, I’d have to take a look at that.”

In July, with the Coastal Celebration out of service unexpectedly owing to a defective propeller blade seal, BC Ferries staff booked passengers with reservations on the other three ships that continued sailing, each of which already had a large number of bookings.

The result was a situation like Wednesday’s where it would be nearly impossible for a passenger to get a vehicle on a vessel without a reservation.

The details are in a July 27 slide presentation prepared for Premier David Eby. “Reservations sold increased to 95 [per cent] on the remaining [three] ships for the majority of sailings,” one slide said, summing up the situation between July 20 and July 26. “Minimal standby capacity available.”

The presentation also made it clear that the traffic the system was dealing with at the time was no higher than normal for the season and was in fact down slightly from the same period a year earlier.

Fleming said it’s important to keep space available for vehicles without bookings.

“I don’t ever want to see the ferries go to 100 per cent reservation, and I think the CEO understands that’s neither desirable nor a good idea,” Fleming said in an interview Tuesday, before Wednesday’s chaos. “The reason is there are people that need to get on and off the islands, sometimes rather quickly, or need to use it routinely without the extra cost of a reservation.” Nicolas Jimenez is the BC Ferries CEO.

When BC Ferries introduced reservation fees on the main routes between Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland in 1997, the publicly owned corporation said a maximum of 40 per cent of ferry capacity would be reserved for people willing to pay more.

Two years ago BC Ferries spokesperson Deborah Marshall told The Tyee the amount of deck space available for reservation could be as high as 75 per cent, depending on the vessel and the sailing.

Now, according to a table available on BC Ferries’ website, the major routes between Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland dedicate as much as 85 per cent of deck space to reservations. (Some of the smaller routes where service may be less frequent, such as between Prince Rupert and Haida Gwaii or Vancouver and the Southern Gulf Islands, are fully bookable.)

That means that on the major routes, when there’s an issue like Wednesday’s, there’s little room available to absorb bookings moved from cancelled sailings.

In July, when the Coastal Celebration was temporarily out of service for nine days and no large vessel was available to replace it, BC Ferries moved some 7,200 reservations onto alternate sailings. “Everyone got a space on the day they planned to travel,” Marshall said in an email. “As a result, the majority of sailings had deck space reserved up to 95 per cent.”

BC United Leader Kevin Falcon blamed the cancellations and long waits on the BC NDP government increasing political involvement in the ferry system, including by appointing former NDP cabinet minister Joy MacPhail as chair of the company’s board of directors.

“The accountability rests with David Eby and the NDP,” Falcon said. “Whether it’s the reservation system, shortage of workers, seven sailing wait, cancelled sailings, all of this has to come back to the leadership team and the leadership team was put in place by this government. They have to be held accountable.”

Adam Olsen, BC Green Party MLA for Saanich North and the Islands, said that the key is to get vessels repaired and back into service and make sure they are fully staffed so that the ferry company can better meet the demand.

He said he supports the reservation system as it adds a level of certainty for customers who have booked ahead. “The reality is I think the ferry system is going to go to a full-reservation system,” he said. “It’s been moving that way.”

If, however, everyone needs a reservation, there should be no extra charge to book ahead, he said. “It absolutely just needs to be part of the fee that people are paying,” he said. “It shouldn’t be an extra cost if that’s the system we’re moving to.”

Fleming said it’s an open question what the right amount of deck space to make available for reservations is, and it might vary depending on the season and peak periods. “I do know it’s important to listen to ferry users including the ferry advisory committees on questions like that.”

The government has taken various steps to keep ferry fares down, he said, including by cutting fares on the minor routes by 15 per cent in 2018, restoring free travel for seniors from Monday to Thursday and recently giving the company an extra $500 million to help it avoid bigger fare increases over the next four years of its performance contract.

“We were able to get those rates down to below inflation, which was really important for us,” Fleming said. “BC Ferries has among the cheapest fares in the world for a comprehensive ferry system like this, and our government has worked extremely hard to keep those fares reduced because of a number of cost pressures including labour rates, including fuel rates, and just basically escalation on all the types of materials that go into operating that are part of the supply chain for a company like that.”