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Life Is a Gravy Boat at BC Ferries

Two-tier lounges aren’t the only examples of privilege at the quasi-private corporation.

Tom Sandborn 9 Feb 2005TheTyee.ca

Tom Sandborn was born in Alaska and raised in the wilderness by wolves. Later, Jesuits at the University of San Francisco and radical feminists in Vancouver generously gave time and energy to the difficult task of educating and humanizing him. Tom has a formal education, too: a BA from UBC. He has been practicing the dark arts of journalism off and on ever since university, and now also has about five decades of social justice, peace and environmental campaigning under his belt.

Tom's goal is to live up to the classic definition of a journalist's job from H. L. Menken - to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Reporting Beat: Labour and social justice, health policy, and occasionally environmental issues.

What is the most important issue facing British Columbians?: Two key issues face BC residents (and they're both so compelling and complex that Tom refuses to rank them): income equality and environmental degradation. Both desperately need solutions.

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The cost-plus “quiet lounge” being installed during the current refit of the BC Ferries Spirit of BC may just be the first experiment in two-tier travel for the recently privatized ferry service, vice-president for marketing and retail services Geoff Dickson recently told The Tyee.

But don’t look for public notice about the plans on the BC Ferries web site any time soon. Despite the nearly half-a-million-dollar cost the luxury retreat for business travellers will add to the $14 million refit for each spirit-class ferry so modified, the site is still silent on the matter.

The web site lists details of all other refit changes, but says nothing about the plan for special accommodations for travellers willing to pay $7 a head to skip coffee shop and newsstand lines and to enjoy “complimentary” newspapers, coffee, and pastries. Dickson told The Tyee that information about the lounge will be added to the BC Ferry web site “closer to March, when the Spirit of BC returns to service.”

Dickson also said he expects the next spirit-class vessel due for maintenance, the Spirit of Vancouver Island, will be fitted out with a comparable lounge facility next year.

There are other interesting omissions on the BC Ferries web site. For example, the site describes the company’s new president, former New Yorker David Hahn, as “Chief Operating Officer at Ogden Aviation, managing U.S. and international operations, including 25,000 employees and airport operations in 30 countries.”

Hahn broke up company

Mayne Island writer Terry Glavin pointed out a year ago, in an article originally published in the Georgia Straight, that Hahn came to the quasi-privatized BC Ferry Services Inc. in 2003 with a more complex job history.

In fact, according to Glavin, Hahn served for four years as vice president of energy and transportation giant Covanta, Ogden Aviation’s parent company, where he presided over the sale of company assets following a monumental bankruptcy.

Covanta began as Ogden Corporation and adopted a new name as it diversified. It encountered big trouble in the energy business, built up $3.3 billion in debt, and Hahn had to dispose of the Ogden Aviation businesses he had previously managed.

Glavin, citing an article in the Troubled Company Reporter, says as part of his settlement upon leaving the company he was paid a $30,000 a month consulting fee, which extended through his first year of employment at BC Ferries. In addition, he received more than $200,000 in other payments.

This helps to put Hahn’s belief that ferry workers are on a gravy train, er, boat, in perspective, and explains the buttons worn by some ferry workers that read “Pass the gravy, Davey.”

Lounge ‘not elitist’

Dickson said the luxury lounge, which will seat a maximum of 93 passengers each voyage, on craft that can carry a passenger load of 2,000, is “open to everybody. We expect an average of between 30 to 50 passengers a trip will use the lounge. Our polling indicated that 20 percent of our passengers were interested in this concept. It’s not elitist. It all comes down to what you sell, how people are going to be satisfied. The lounge will offer one-stop shopping. We’re trying to meet the needs of our customers.”

The proposed lounge will be open to children if their parents are willing and able to pay for them too. “We just have to hope the three year olds will be well behaved,” Dickson said.

A modest squall of public dismay blew up after The Tyee broke news of the plans for luxury lounge installation last month. Critics decried the lounge as both elitist and reflective of a new, less than egalitarian impulse in B.C. life, and the stories put Hahn on the defensive. “The thing that some people are kicking around,” he told the Province, “that we’re putting in some kind of luxury box or business class lounge is not true. What we’re offering is a lounge. I don’t deny that at all.”

BC Ferries dismissed a rumour that those who pay for the new business class lounge might also be permitted to jump the queue at ferry terminals. BC Ferry Services Inc. media relations director Deborah Marshall told The Tyee that “passengers will buy admission to the lounge once they’re on board, so there is no way this could be tied to priority boarding.”

Priority boarding is currently available to those with assured boarding tickets, which sell in 10-ticket books for $749. Each ticket covers the fare and assured boarding for one standard vehicle, a driver, and a passenger.

It also seems unlikely that BC Ferries would upset its current reservation system, which allows customers to book a spot on the main Vancouver Island and Sunshine Coast routes for a $15 premium.

Reservation system ’troubling’

Lack of transparency regarding reservation fees has already prompted criticism from the province’s ferry watchdog. The reservations system is a “troubling area,” B.C. ferry commissioner Martin Crilly said in his first annual review of the quasi-private ferry corporation. Reservations aren’t subject to his review, since the Coastal Ferry Act defines them as ancillary services like the gift shops and cafeterias. “Nevertheless, in my view, there is risk that the company will unduly exploit its monopoly position in the supply and price of reserved and unreserved spaces on these often-congested routes, especially if there is significant growth in traffic in the next few years.”

The controversy about two-tier travel has emerged following the 2003 privatization of BC Ferries, which operated as a Crown corporation since 1960. That was followed by a bitter strike and controversial binding arbitration settlement that imposes a seven-year contract with no wage increases in the first three years and a six percent raise spread out over the final years of the deal.

“Deal,” however, may be the wrong word for labour agreements with BC Ferry Services Inc. The company was created by the Coastal Ferry Act, which preemptively privileges ferries management decisions over the terms of any collective agreement. The act also trumps the Labour Relations Code when the two conflict, yet another example of the BC Liberals’ creative approach to workers rights, an approach that has seen the Campbell government denounced by the United Nations’ International Labour Organization.

Act’s exemptions are broad

The Coastal Ferry Act exempts the new corporation from freedom of information laws, the Ombudsman Act, and oversight by the Auditor General.

The act also gives enormous power to a ferry commissioner, whose decisions and proceedings, with very narrow exceptions, “must not be questioned, reviewed or restrained by any process or proceeding of any court.” The commissioner also has broad powers to allow uneconomic routes to be eliminated without holding public hearings.

Oh well, we may be governed by a rogue regime that’s in trouble with the UN watchdog on workers’ rights, but we can always kick back and enjoy ourselves with free croissants in the first-class lounges on B.C. ferries.

Those of you in steerage, keep rowing. All aboard!

Vancouver writer Tom Sandborn is a frequent contributor to The Tyee.
 [Tyee]

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