Islanders Don’t Believe Sacking the Ferry Advisory Committees Will Ensure Better Decisions and Inclusion.
The following letters to BCF CEO Jimenez and the BCF Commissioner regarding the sacking of the Ferry Advisory Committees concludes my two year campaign for justice. This campaign began when the Friend’s of Denman Forests stood up to BCF to prevent the indiscriminate axing of our trees at the Gravelly Bay terminal and ended with Juan Barker and I appealing to the Office of the Ombudsperson to investigate the BCF Commissioner for breach of her mandate to hold BCF accountable and to balance OUR needs with other stakeholders. We should hear shortly if the Ombudsperson will initiate an investigation.
Now that regional newspapers like the Comox Valley Record and the Times Colonist have been bought by Glacier Media, a right-wing multinational conglomerate, I am personally grateful for publications like the Grapevine in which we can still freely express our grievances with governments and the industries they support.
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Dear CEO Jimenez:
I am sending the pasted appeal to the Commissioner and letter to Vancouver Island editors about your sacking of the Ferry Advisory Committees again just in case my first attempt did not reach your office.
By sacking the FACs, islanders feel that keeping a failed experiment, the Baynes Sound Connector, in service for an entire decade will continue indefinitely now that we do not have a voice in decision-making that the FAC system provided.
Keeping a cabled ferry, which industry experts predicted could not do the job, in service for a decade is causing immense suffering and substantial expenses for islanders and island businesses, some of whom are forced to move off island. The threat of increased fares will have its obvious profound negative effect.
I understand you are investigating the degree of islander’s discontent about being stuck with an unreliable vessel. Take it from me– Islanders are angry and feel hopeless given the persistent claims that the ferry provides a service that the FACTS and our daily experience deny.
Islanders had high hopes that the failures of past leadership would be corrected when you became CEO. Your continued support, however, of ex-CEO Collin’s decisions about the cable ferry and associated pattern of deceptive reporting in annual reports (zero cancellations for Route 21 were recorded in the 203/24 annual report to the Commissioner) has been more than disappointing.
Islanders feel especially vexed that Route 23, which competes with Route 21 as the most profitable for BCF, received two electric ferries while Route 21 remains stuck with a single inadequate dud. Quadra, moreover, has substantially fewer residents.
Islanders feel that we continue to pay the price for former BCF leadership’s mistakes. There is only one solution: provide Route 21 with an island class vessel.
Respectfully,
Sharon Small,
Denman Island Resident and
Retired Business College Professor
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Dear Commissioner Hage:
Pasted below is a letter submitted to the editors of various Vancouver Island newspapers about the sudden sacking of the FACs and the Premier’s silence and yours, despite the Conservatives calling for keeping the FACs.
How are shocked ferry-dependent islanders to interpret the ongoing disconnect between what you state the Coastal Ferry Act authorizes the Commissioner to do–directing BCF in your May 2024 letter to improve its engagement efforts with the highly valued FACs– and BCF sacking the FACs?
Many Hornby and Denman islanders, whose ferry insecurity is profound, feel victimized for exposing BC Ferries’ deceit and incompetence with respect to the Baynes Sound Connector. BCF continues to claim service has improved and attempts to prove this fantasy by underreporting cancellations in annual reports (zero for 2023/24) and claiming in the press after lengthy cancellations that service has improved. Recently received FOI information confirms, however, that all claims of saving tax dollars, the environment and providing service on a par with the Quinitsa are false.
Rumour has it that after an FAC meeting in 2015 in which the ex-CEO extolled the virtues of the proposed cable ferry, ferry staff overheard him exclaim that as far as he was concerned, “Denman Island could piss in a pot,” an expression for “keep the people poor”.
Keeping Route 21 service poor, despite competing with Quadra as the most profitable short routes, which received two new ferries apparently, has apparently the blessings of the NDP.
Thus, again, islanders appeal to you and to Premier Eby to hold BCF accountable for ending the hypocrisy and for providing Route 21 with a reliable island class ferry, like the one designed by a retired master skipper who foreshadowed the service unreliability in 2013 because a cable ferry could not do the job.
Respectfully,
Sharon Small,
Denman Island Resident
