Don’t be fooled by ferry tale
Obscurantism: Government talks transparency while obscuring who calls the shots
Legislative reporter Rob Shaw’s revealing interview with the provincial transportation minister, Todd Stone, about BC Ferries’ 2015 outlook raises an important question — how did we get so mired in our current political culture of obscurantism.
For those looking to enrich their vocabulary, obscurantism is a concept generally applied to governments which talk transparency while obscuring information from the public.
Here, we have a government that propagates the impression that BC Ferries is a private for-profit entity rather than a public utility and that it makes market-based decisions without interference from the province, which stands behind the screen as sole shareholder professing it’s powerless to affect the policies which impose decisions on the monopoly it owns — all the while pulling all the levers.
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” the wizard of Oz told Dorothy in the American fairy tale.
Dorothy wasn’t fooled. Neither should anyone here be deceived.
Thanks to government ideology, millions of ferry passengers have been driven off by a policy of raising prices and slashing services while foisting overhead onto small community users to whom ferries are not a discretionary recreational diversion, but an essential service for getting to doctors’ appointments, school, work, minor hockey tournaments and the grocery store.
Does anyone still subscribe to the illusion that this corporate fairy tale serves any other purpose than to obscure the way in which capital debt is shifted from where it belongs, on the province’s books?
Government obscurantism contends that the cost of upgrading infrastructure — terminals, new operating equipment, a proposed reservation system that will wind up costing who knows how much and which critics say could make problems worse, not better — has nothing to do with the province. It’s to be blamed on rich, greedy, entitled users like those fat cats who choose to live in Bella Bella, a community which has only been there about 8,000 years longer than Vancouver.
Stone admitted as much last week when he told Shaw that “BC Ferries debt is not rolled up on the province’s bottom line. If that debt was on our bottom line, it would very potentially impact our credit rating and drive up borrowing costs.”
Let’s see. … If the total debt for BC Ferries now amounts to about two per cent of the province’s debt load, is that going to cause bond rating agencies to savage the credit rating? And if that’s the case, what about the $8 billion — and climbing — in capital debt we’re proposing to take on with the Site C Hydro dam? That would be about 12 per cent of the debt, six times the present ferry debt.
Our real concern should be the longterm financial implication of a strategy by which fares continue to rise faster than inflation even as passengers continue to flee.
Since the ferries were ‘privatized’ on April Fool’s Day, 2003 — hey, you couldn’t make this stuff up — the userpay pricing strategy (about 80 per cent of operating costs are recovered from ferry users; TransLink users, on the other hand, pay about 50 per cent) has now driven off almost two million passengers, close to a million of them from the so-called “minor routes.”
Stone professes that the cupboard is bare. The provincial subsidy of $170 million a year can’t be increased, he says, all the while moaning that government assuming necessary infrastructure costs will affect provincial credit ratings, drive up borrowing costs and starve hospitals and schools.
If subsidies are frozen and if passengers are expected to finance infrastructure spending, it seems reasonable to expect fares to rise and price resistance to grow. This leaves the dubious prospect of requiring the ferry corporation to try to extract ever more money from a dwindling customer base while offering less service.
Using Stone’s rationale, the $2.4-billion Port Mann Bridge or the $4-billion spending on Pacific Gateway and Port Metro Vancouver infrastructure or, heaven forbid, the paltry half-billion promised for highway upgrades to and from his Kamloops riding, all put health care and education at risk.
“To allow the continuation of this charade will be the undoing of all of us,” Jim Cleghorn of the B.C. Ferry Coalition observed in a recent letter urging local politicians to scrutinize the consequences of provincial ferry policy. “If you think past fare increases have been high, hang on to your hat, they have to go much higher.”
That is, if government doesn’t fix this mess, he means.
Meanwhile, R. J. Milbourne, who served three terms as a member of the B.C. Utilities Commission, warns in a recent submission to the Ferry Commissioner that new proposals for a system-wide reservation system are ill-judged, discriminatory and, instead of proving BC Ferries’ salvation, could “lead to further traffic and revenue losses, and accelerate the financial death spiral that BCF has created for itself.”
Furthermore, his submission describes the scheme as “incomplete, unreasonably opaque, ill-considered, and, if approved and implemented, will result in tariff schedules that are unduly discriminatory within customer classes.”
Let’s have done with paternalistic obscurantism. We’re all adults. Our provincial wizards should come out from behind the invisible curtain when it comes to ferry financing.
Maybe, in the interests of openness, we need some kind of inquiry to help find our way to government policy that solves problems instead of creating them while pretending they belong to someone else and not to everyone in B.C.
Does anyone still subscribe to the illusion that this corporate fairy tale serves any other purpose than to obscure the way in which capital debtis shifted from where it belongs, on the province’s books?