Ferry-fee saga shouldn’t have been so painful

So finally, we have the Big Reveal on Yarmouth-tomaine ferry management fees.

In case you missed it, the number is $1.17 million. Per year.

Put another way, that would be $97,500 a month since 2018. If they meet certain targets, that amount could go as high as $2.34 million. Per year.

This isn’t the operating cost. It’s just what Bay Ferries gets paid to run the service. The government is paying somewhere between $16 million and $18 million per year to operate the ferry.

Opposition Leader Tim Houston calls the revelation a victory for Nova Scotia taxpayers. I suppose he would say that. He has been asking for this information since 2016, and he launched the court case to force the government’s hand.

This week, Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Richard Coughlan ordered the Liberal government to tell the Progressive Conservatives how much Bay Ferries is being paid to run its service between Yarmouth and Maine.

So now we know. Yay for us.

I don’t want to ruin the party here, Mr. Houston, but you can hold off on the firecrackers and the champagne corking because I’m not sure the victor is the Nova Scotia taxpayer.

Let’s set aside the question of whether Nova Scotia taxpayers should be supporting the Yarmouth-to-maine ferry in the first place. That is another discussion. And it’s worth having.

And let’s also put aside the matter of the ferry not being in service in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, and suspended the summer before when it moved to Bar Harbor. That, too, is another question.

For today’s purposes, let’s just zero in on the fact that taxpayers have been left in the dark about the way their money has been spent. Those costs were hidden from us because the premier at the time categorically did not want us to know.

Stephen Mcneil was adamant that revealing this cost would constitute an “attack on proprietary information in the private sector.” He said this would put a chill on companies like Bay Ferries that might not want to want to do business with the Nova Scotia government.

What he — the premier at the time, who represented taxpayers — was saying is that taxpayers’ right to know how their money is being spent is less important than Bay Ferries’ right to privacy.

That just seems wrong to me. Surely, Bay Ferries knew there’d be a certain level of transparency required when they decided to do business with a government. And surely the premier would be in a position to tell them so.

The Tory opposition has been all over this. When their original access-to-information request was denied, they went to the privacy commissioner for an opinion.

Privacy czar Catherine Tully (now retired) reviewed the file through the lens of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act and said there was no evidence that the interests of Bay Ferries would be compromised by a disclosure. She said the government should disclose management fees paid to Bay Ferries.

But the commissioner had no power to force the government’s hand and, unsurprisingly, the government refused to comply.

So the Tories appealed to the Supreme Court. And here we are.

A lot of money had to be spent on legal fees and a lot of time has passed by, just to get information to which we were entitled.

If you want to get all democratic about things, we should have known this information all along, in the name of transparency and accountability.

Now fledgling Premier Iain Rankin will have some explaining to do. Nova Scotians are going to demand answers about the ferry service.

It will be interesting to see how he answers. In the past, he was firmly in the Mcneil camp of protecting the business from the taxpayer. He said the opposition was just playing politics.

The Yarmouth ferry is going to be a tough sell to Nova Scotia taxpayers and hiding the management fees did not help the case.