CBC’s Justin McElroy reported that three aluminum ships built in British Columbia during the 1990s will be sold or sent to ship-breakers. Constructed for about 800 million in today’s dollars, the three “fast ferries” are now worth little or nothing more than scrap value.
North Vancouver business consultant Rob Arthurs, in collaboration with associates, hopes to resell these ferries and see them returned to use.
The ships were intended to shorten travel time between Vancouver Island and the mainland. More importantly, the NDP government of the day aimed to open an international market for the province’s shipbuilding industry. Design compromises made the ships unfit for use in BC’s coastal waters and subsequent governments lost interest in promoting BC shipyards.
Aided by partisan media, BC Liberals found real value in the fast ferries by using them for more than a decade to score political points. The ship project was claimed to be proof that a then left-wing party was incapable of conducting public business. Politicians and their allies pretended to be disturbed by the aluminum ferry project. They deemed it an unprecedented waste of money.
With the passage of time, megaproject madness has accelerated but the voices of critics are muted. Consider the lack of outrage aimed at current projects in British Columbia. Unlike fast ferries, all of them are destructive and the largest, which enables greater consumption of fossil fuels, threaten the long-term existence of humanity:
- The budget for LNG Canada is said to be almost $50 billion, including $15 billion for the Coastal GasLink pipeline that was promised at $5 billion.
- Trans Mountain pipeline, initially budgeted at $5 billion, is almost certain to exceed $35 billion.
- BC Hydro President Marc Eliesen said Site C was too costly and environmentally unacceptable when he cancelled the project in 1993. It was then budgeted at $5.5 billion in 2023 dollars. If it produces electricity in 2025, the megaproject in northeast BC is likely to cost about $20 billion and will produce electricity at four to five times the cost of alternative power sources.
Expenditure of a comparatively small sum spent by a government expecting to improve ferry service and expand the shipbuilding industry became a convenient cudgel for NDP opponents.
Some members of the BC Legislative Press Gallery sold the fast ferries failure as a political and economic crisis. Those same purported journalists are near silent on projects today that are harmful to us all.
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Categories: BC Ferries
in-sights.ca 
Thank you Pat for the reminder! Had the Socreds, B.C. Lieberals, etc. not proceeded with thesee projects or kept them on budget, the money could have been used for things such as education, health care, housing and we might not be in the pickle we are today. When these projects went over budget, always wondered who was really getting the money because it would have been difficult to over spend as they were. Mind you when it comes to roads in B.C. and going back to the days of Highway’s Minister Galghardi, there were so many ever so many interesting stories a kid would over hear when the adults weren’t paying attention to said kid.
What is interesting is the media made so much noise about the Fast Cats, but when the German ferries came to B.C. there were problems with them “eating logs” and needing repairs as the story goes, from some one who worked there. Never saw anything in the press about that
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Here are a few more oopsies to ponder.
BC Place Stadium roof upgrade: 514% of initial estimate.
While the official line is that the upgrade to BC Place Stadium skyrocketed from $365 to $514 million, a January 2008 letter from operator PAVCO’s Chairman David Podmore to Vancouver City Manager Judy Rogers pegged the total cost at just $100 million. I’m no architect, but that seems like a reasonable price, whereas $514 million does not. After all, Seattle built a perfectly good stadium for its Seahawks in 2002 for just $360 million. All we got is a roof.
Port Mann Bridge/Hwy 1 widening: 550% of initial estimate.
According to The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, “Originally, the government said the cost of improvements to the Port Mann would be $600 million. That ballooned to $1.5 billion in 2006 when the government announced it would twin the bridge. Total cost of the project exceeded $3.3 billion”
South Fraser Perimeter Road: 169% of initial estimate.
Perhaps the only way for the Liberal government to assert it’s on time and on budget with a major project is to lie about it, as this unnecessary, convoluted truck highway through Delta and Surrey demonstrates. Laila Yuile, a blogger and one of the province’s shrewdest transportation project watchdogs, recalled last year that initial estimates for the project ranged from $700-800 million. By the time it was completed in 2013, it was a year late and the cost had risen to $1.264 Billion – significantly more than a revised estimate of around a billion dollars. But that didn’t stop the government from boasting that its project was “on time and on budget”. As Vaughan Palmer quipped at the time, “Regular readers of this space will be familiar with the more flexible approach that the B.C. Liberals have taken toward the concept of being on time and on budget.”
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Indeed, there have many budget boondoggles in recent years. Gone were the days when old W.A.C. kept his hands firmly on the public purse.
I have written about some of those budget disasters. Linked here.
Fast ferries got special treatment from the media and the BC Liberals and their pay-to-play friends. I think atoma4u has it right. The ferry project could have worked but politics got in the way.
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Well we are spending over $11 billion to extend the proprietary Movia Automatic Light Metro (the real name of the trains used on the Expo and Millennium lines) system a mere 21.7 km.
The government & TransLink’s costs do not include:
1) The resignalling needed to operate the lines at a higher capacity Contract let in 2022, $1.47 billion).
2) The Operations and Maintenance Centre #5 to enable the trains to maintain their maximum capacity (estimated at $500 million to $1 billion).
3) The electrical rehab of the E&M Lines needed to reach projected maximum capacity (estimated cost $2 billion)
4) The replacement of all the switches on the Expo line with high-speed switches to achieve project capacity of 17,500 pphpd (estimated cost, neat $1 billion because the needed adjustments to the guideway).
5) The new cars needed to achieve the estimated maximum capacity of 17,500 pphpd.
The $4.01 billion the NDP are advertising for the 16 km Surrey Langley extension is from 2021 and adjusting for inflation, the cost is near $4.47 billion, and with structural cement now $450 per metre/3, the estimated cost for the guideway may surpass $5 billion, all for a light metro line which according to TransLink, will carry fewer customers than the Broadway B-99 Bus!
for added insult, according to Thales news Release in 2022 ………
“When the programme is fully implemented, the Expo Line will be able to accommodate 17,500 passengers per hour per direction, and the Millennium Line will be able to handle 7500 passengers per hour per direction, a 32% and 96% increase respectively.”
The Broadway subway, which is the 5.7 km extension of the Millennium line will have a maximum capacity of only 7,500 pphpd. Think about this, in the late 1940’s the Toronto Transit commission was operating coupled sets of PCC cars on selected routes achieving peak hour capacities in excess of 12,.000 pphpd and the North American standard for building a subway is a transit route which has traffic flows in excess of 15,000 pphpd!
Question: where is the mainstream media on this one?
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The “fastCats” were originally designed for an Iona Island to Gabriola Island run, with a crossing time of under 40 minutes. The FastCats were strictly for auto traffic and did not have bow doors.
There would be a new bridge built from Gabriola to Vancouver island, thus eliminating their ferry. As originally conceived it was a very good plan, but
the good burghers of Gabriola protested the concept of a bridge and in an election year, Clark and the NDP folded like a cheap deck chair.
The FastCats were already ordered and a redesign was needed, by adding bow door, so it could operate on regular ferry routes. This added about 50 tons to the weight conscious boats and really cause a lot of problems. More problems arose as the propulsion system cause a lot of scour and wakes on the routes causing problems.
Being unconventional and now under-powered, they became gas guzzlers and really uneconomic to operate.
The rest as they say, is history.
What I find interesting is that if the original plan was put into reality, the FastCats would have been a success, taking pressure off both Horseshoe Bay and Tsawwassen, (reducing auto use on the Massey Tunnel with much cheaper ferry prices all around.
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Thanks for the info. I didn’t know that was the initial purpose.
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