A cruise crisis of its own making
Outdated law bred reliance on Canada
Arecent Times-colonist story opened a window onto a miserable sight: desperate American legislators pleading for Canada’s help in saving the state of Alaska from the destructive effects of a pointless U.S. statute. Because of the pandemic, Canada has closed its ports to cruise ships until Feb. 28, 2022. There is no real reason this should stop any American from sailing to Alaska if he can find someone to take him — but there is the Passenger Vessel Services Act of 1886 (PVSA), which outlaws uninterrupted travel between U.S. ports by “foreign vessels.”
In U.S. maritime law, a “foreign vessel” is any ship flying under some other country’s flag, as nearly all cruise ships in existence do. An American-flagged cruise ship would have to observe U.S. labour laws, be U.s.owned and, here’s the hard part, have been built in the U.S. Companies offering Alaska cruises get around the law by making stops in Canadian ports.
When Canada closed those in early 2020, the tourist economy in Alaska was obliterated. The 2021 season would normally begin in April and run until fall, but early sailings have already been cancelled.
The intelligent reader will observe that the inconvenient PVSA was overt protectionism adopted in an age of steam, before the concept of aviation had left the realm of science fiction. No one would now think to exclude foreign-built aircraft from point-to-point journeys in the United States, but that remains the rule for boats.
Unfortunately, the U.S. cruise industry has stubbornly refused to come into existence and be protected by this legislation. In the 1990s the U.S. House of Representatives occasionally passed bills that would have relaxed the PVSA’S restrictions, but they could never clear the Senate. The major cruise lines have built a lucrative business on Pvsa-friendly routes in Alaska and the Caribbean: they aren’t interested in change, or weren’t until they developed a little Canada problem.
A subsidy-sucking company called American Classic Voyages (ACV) told legislators it had big plans for an entire fleet of U.s.-flagged vessels, and insisted on the preservation of its protected market, even receiving the right to flag the foreign-built Holland America liner Nieuw Amsterdam. But 9/11 wiped ACV out almost instantly, and Nieuw Amsterdam was handed back to the Dutch. The one “American-built” ship that could be assembled from half-completed hulls now serves the Hawaiian islands under a U.S. flag — although it is owned by an American subsidiary of Norwegian Cruise Lines. The parts left behind from ACV’S bankruptcy had to be towed to Bremerhaven, the heart of German shipbuilding, to be turned into a seaworthy “American” vessel. American shipyards, it turns out, are kept pretty busy by the military-industrial complex.
Alaska’s congressional delegation is now seeking a one-year suspension of the PVSA as it applies to the state. But its real hope seems to be that it can persuade Canada, at whom the lawmakers are mildly annoyed, to allow for “technical” stops at Victoria which would satisfy the law. No passengers would be permitted to disembark, but a ship could be inspected and provisioned. This is probably a perfectly reasonable compromise. It would amount to much the same thing as letting goods cross the U.s.-canada border on trucks during the pandemic.
But it is a matter of Americans asking us to change our laws because its own PVSA is not capable of repeal. And, of course, repeal is probably the last thing Alaska wants. The state takes a lot of business from travellers (Canadians and Americans alike) who want to take an affordable cruise and who aren’t too particular about where it goes. Its entire economy is partly predicated on the existence of the PVSA.
That’s the abominable nature of protectionism: given time to work, it makes otherwise illogical economic distortions permanent facts of life, ones on which workers and communities genuinely depend. Wasteful procedures and moronic legal fictions become irreformable. Cruise ships are a sort of supply chain for pure tourist dollars, and this is a case of a supply chain made fragile by protectionism, which is for some reason always defended as a way of strengthening a country. In this case it has made the U.S. so strong that it has to go crawling to Canada’s prime minister to keep the economy of its biggest state from drying up and crumbling like a fallen leaf.