BC Ferry Profits

Last night I listened to televsion news (I don't remember which station) talking about the BC Ferries not making a profit on most of their ferry routes. So who cares? Why do the ferries have to make a profit? They are part of the transportation system. Do the Lion's Gate Bridge or the Ironworkers' Memorial Bridge have to make a profit? Imagine the North Shore without those bridges. Try to guess how many people would live in West Vancouver or North Vancouver without the transportation infrastructure presently in place. Knock out those bridges and you can largely forget about the North Shore as a viable place to live, work or run a business. You can also forget about the Horseshoe Bay Ferry Terminal and the Sea-To-Sky Highway to Whistler. Bye-bye Whistler. Okay, I am being a bit facetious. But not too much. Back in my childhood, our far-flung province was opened up to growth and development by the provincial government (mostly W.A.C. Bennet and the Social Credit party) building and improving roads all over the province - and hydro-electric dams. I can still remember riding in my parents' car down the Fraser Canyon Highway and going over narrow wooden trestles that seemed to dangle in thin air overtop a precipitious three-hundred foot drop. The government made that highway immeasurably better - perhaps to facilitate our former Minister of Highways, Flying Phil Gaglardi, racing at breakneck speed down to the coast from his home in Kamloops. Whatever the reasons, it worked. The highways did open up British Columbia, and the ferries were an integral part of the highway sytem. That is the point. The ferries are part of the transportation infrastructure in the province and should be viewed in that light. When you talk about user-pay policies keep in mind the ferries do not just benefit the ferry passengers. When a freight truck loaded with produce, industrial products or consumer goods uses the ferry to take its cargo to Vancouver Island, who is the beneficiary of the ferry service?  The trucker, the producer or manufacturer, the end user of the products, the intermediary wholesalers and retailers or all of the above? The answer is obvious. Perhaps if we stop viewing the ferries as a potential profit centre we can also stop thinking that we need to pay the BC Ferry Corporation executives such ridiculously high salaries.

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