Doing the math
I’m not someone who usually likes to bang on about government spending. It’s easy to take one expense out of context and blow its significance out of proportion to make it look like money is being wasted. Right wing pundits love taking facts about how much the government spends on odd things like mashed potatoes, pencils or long distance calling and freaking out about it and claiming that the private sector could be doing the same job, except without the expenses as though the private sector can operate without pencils, long distance calling and mashed potatoes.
But like everyone else in B.C. I’m totally hypnotized by the saga of the FastCat Ferries as sort of the extreme sports version of government waste. For those of you who don’t live in B.C. or maybe missed the whole big thing the FastCats were giant speedy ferries that the provincial government had built years ago to stimulate the province’s ship building industry and use as part of B.C. Ferries’ fleet.
The provincial government hired Washington Marine to build them, the costs leapt and they ended up costing over $454 million and the provincial NDP any chance they had of being reelected. So the province finally got them, and found out that they wouldn’t work in the waters they were needed for. So after sitting at the docks for awhile they were sold back to Washington Marine for $20 million.
Okay so the province felt stupid loosing $434 million on a few ferries that never worked. But I bet they feel even stupider now that Washington Marine is talking about using the FastCats in a ferry service they want to set up to compete against the government run B.C. Ferries. Granted it was the NDP who built the stupid things in the first place but it was the Conservatives who sold it for a stupidly low price.
And what the fuck, why doesn’t someone sue Washington Marine? There seems to me that there has to at least something against the law about selling something that doesn’t work to a customer for well over the quoted price, then buying it back at a huge reduced rate and then fixing it and using it yourself.
For more on this sad tale check out the CBC’s story on it.
You’re being incredibly naive from end to end about this whole project.
1) The reason they were sold for a really low price is because they were utterly unwanted. The design, aside from what may be inherent flaws, was wildly unsuited to the run it was on. Most fast ferry designs around the world are used on much longer runs (think 3+ hours, sometimes much more) where their speed can make a real difference.
2) The NDP straight up blew it by deciding that this should be a made-in-BC project. There were numerous non-BC shipyards around the world at the time that had experience building fast ferries, but they were all passed over (including the option of using an existing fast ferry) for a make-work-in-BC project that gave the job to a local builder with no experience in this kind of construction. This also leads back to point 1: since this was a proven troublesome trio of hulls competing against lots of perfectly reliable ships available on the market, nobody wanted the PacifiCats.
3) This wasn’t a huge surprise. The government ignored expert advice that this project was a mistake from several points of view (run inherently unsuited to fast ferry service; using an unproven design from an inexperienced shipbuilder (the latter was inherent in the decision to build in BC), and they pressed on regardless.
4) I’m far less inclined to blame Washington Marine for this problem than the government. The specs were flawed, the project could never have succeeded, and they were a shipyard in a very special place: a huge contract in which they were guaranteed they wouldn’t see competing bids from any of the truly competitive global suppliers. Hands up everyone here who is willing to turn down free money offered legally. The government made a deliberate decision to give this project to a company that has not done this sort of project before. It’s bad that Washington didn’t build a better boat, but the teething problems might have been survivable if the run had any inherent need for a fast ferry. It does not.
5) What is ludicrous at $450M is workable at $20M. Washington was in the privileged position of knowing better than anyone else in the world the vices and virtues of this design (or they think they do; it’s quite possible they will just lose money on their new fleet). There’s a CBC article there in which a union rep asserts the ferries could have been sold for $60M, but taking that at face value the best-case scenario was a $390M loss.
BTW, I’m still trying to figure out if Washington Marine handled the design: one site on the ships cites a Crown corporation named CFI as the nominal creators of the boats, but presumably the design was contracted out.
This was an NDP-engineered failure from stem to stern. Once this project was approved, nothing could have saved it.
True, hey I’m not saying the NDP were the good guys or anything. But it’s just a kick in the balls to see Washington Marine turning around and planning on using the boats as a competing fleet.
If they’re able to run a successful business then that means that the government could have used the boats and probably gotten more than $20 million worth of service from them.
Fair call, but a private company running a ferry service has different priorities and different cost structures (I’ll just come out and say it: non-union employees) that make things a lot different.
That said, here’s my guess: any attempt to use these ferries on a Vancouver Island run is doomed to financial failure. But I’ll be quite happy if Washington can do it.