Who Owns BC Ferries?

During the recent BC ferry strike there was much talk about how BC Ferries has been privatized by the neo-Liberal provincial government. The question which is immediately top of mind is, who bought it? 

After all, we know CN bought BC Rail, we know the names of the companies who offered to buy the Coquihalla Highway. Surely someone would report on who picked up an entire transportation monopoly for asong?

Or would the story be about who would be foolish enough to buy a company with rundown equipment, querulous customers, and militant workers? 

Hot on the path of another journalistic scoop, your Watershed Sentinel reporter has spent the day perusing the Coastal Ferry Act, the BC Ferry Commissioners work plan, and other assorted puzzling documents. 

From all this research, it appears that the answer is – No One. No One Owns BC Ferries. Or, maybe we the tax payers do, the same as ever. 

In a complicated legerdemain of overlapping and interlocking maneuvers the government turned BC Ferries from a crown corporation into a self-financing private company, and established the BC Ferry Authority to run that company, with a Board of Directors that includes nominees from Regional Districts and the union. The BC Ferry Authority has no capital, and no shares, except for one $1000 voting share in BC Ferries. An appointed BC Ferry Commissioner’s main role apparently is to approve service cuts and rate increases. BC Ferry Commission doesn’t have any shares either. 

Before it turned the new company loose, the government relieved BC Ferries of all its on-shore assets, like docks and terminals, transferring them to the BC Transportation Financing Authority. Good thing the Authority promptly leased them back to BC Ferries for exactly their selling price. 

But as for privatizing? Not on the websites anyway. Not yet. In fact, the newly corporatized ferry system has a 60-year contract which obliges it to provide service according to current schedules with no service cuts and only modest fare increases until after the next election.

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[From WS January/February 2004]

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