There is still one more test this summer for BC Ferries and its new CEO Nicolas Jimenez: Labour Day long weekend.
Can BC Ferries handle the long weekend surge and avoid the snarls and snafus that caused travel chaos on Victoria Day and Canada Day long weekends?
The company appears to have had all hands on deck for the more-recent BC Day long weekend. There were few complaints over cancellations and wait times, compared to the previous holiday long weekends.
While that is encouraging, the reality is that BC Ferries has some long-term structural problems that may take years to fix.
One is an aging fleet that needs to be replaced. An even bigger problem may be maintaining sufficient crews to run the ferries: A BC Ferries career is no longer the golden-ticket job it once was, and the company is starting to find retention to be a challenge.
“We’re not very resilient right now, as a business, when it comes to people,” said Jimenez, who was president and CEO at the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia before he took over as head of BC Ferries in March. His predecessor, Mark Collins, was fired over serious service interruptions last year, mainly stemming from staffing shortages. “We are staffing [a] model that I don’t think really works in 2023.”
The demand on BC Ferries continues to increase at a time when aging vessels are becoming more prone to mechanical breakdowns and ferry workers are either retiring or taking jobs elsewhere – including with other ferry operators like Seaspan Ferries.
Recently, when the Coastal Celebration (Tsawwassen-Swartz Bay) was out of service for a delayed refitting, it meant a loss of 12,000 passages during one of the busiest times of the year – the Canada Day long weekend in July.
“What the August long weekend showed was, when that ship was back in service, the system ran pretty much as it should,” Jimenez said.
BC Ferries’ capital spending plan includes $1.2 billion for vessel replacement between 2024 and 2028. But it takes five to six years to get through the procurement and building process, so there’s no quick fix to that problem.
BC Ferries’ capacity challenges also tend to largely be seasonal. For most of the year, it appears to be able to serve the travelling public just fine. But there may not be enough slack in the system – either in terms of vessel or worker redundancy – in the summer and especially on long weekends.
But government and BC Ferries management may be loath to spend hundreds of millions on vessel and crew redundancy to address problems that may only become chromic a few days of the year.
Leonard Krog, former long-term NDP MLA and now mayor of Nanaimo, doesn’t buy that excuse.
“It’s no explanation or excuse to say, ‘It’s peak season – get used to it,’” Krog said. “As the mayor of an island city, the gateway to Vancouver Island, it is – old language, forgive me – it is our highway, and we cannot afford, nor can we tolerate for any length of time, any serious disruption of the ferry service.”
Over the next few years, BC Ferries is expecting to hike fares by about three per cent annually. Even with those increases, there is still a funding gap, Jimenez said. Fares cover 75 per cent of BC Ferries’ revenue, with the B.C. government covering the other 25 per cent.
Even if Jimenez could buy as many new ferries as may be necessary to cover peak travel periods, staffing them could be a challenge.
BC Ferries has fallen behind on compensation, training and job security, according Eric McNeely, president of the BC Ferry and Marine Workers Union.
“We went from a leading position to a trailing position, and that has knock-on effects for recruitment and retention,” McNeely said. “And what that really means to the travelling public is that there aren’t enough staff to either repair or operate vessels at the frequency which we would have all become accustomed to.”
Transport Canada requires anyone working on a boat of any kind in Canada to have certain qualifications and certifications. But BC Ferries doesn’t provide a lot of the in-house training, so employees or would-be employees are required to cover at least some of the certification costs out of their own pocket. That can be a disincentive to employees who might otherwise be keen to move up the ladder.
For a deckhand, BC Ferries requires a minimum of two certifications, which cost a total of $4,000. And preference is given to those with a Bridge Watch rating, which costs $10,940.
So, getting a job as a deckhand at BC Ferries can cost upwards of $15,000 in training and certification. The starting wage is $28.64 per hour – about $56,000 a year. According to Glassdoor, the average salary for a deckhand at Seaspan Ferries is $73,944 to $80,112 a year.
And most BC Ferry workers have to start out as a casual worker, which means living by the phone and no guarantee of hours for years before moving up to permanent full-time positions.
Because wages at BC Ferries have fallen behind, McNeely said fewer people are willing to live by the phone as a casual worker, and that has an impact on regular full-time workers.
“It’s a knock-on effect,” McNeely said. “If you have less casual relief, you have less relief for the regulars.”
Jimenez agrees that compensation, training and job security is insufficient, and has already taken some steps to address the problem.
For one, he has initiated an early reopening of the contract with the Ferry Workers union to address compensation.
“That’s a recognition that the five-year deal that was set back in 2020 did not reflect the world as we find it in 2023, and the compensation adjustments just clearly don’t reflect inflation and what’s happened in the markets generally,” Jimenez said.
He said the company is also changing the way it hires people.
“We dispensed with the seasonal category, put everyone into a casual model, and we said, ‘Hey, look, we are going to guarantee you hours between May and September,’” he said.
“I do believe that the historical way in which people have secured employment in the company has been to spend years on the casual staffing ranks before they can get into a regular employee position. You get guaranteed hours, but you can’t control your schedule. And I think that’s something we need to look at and revisit.”
Given the certifications that BC Ferry workers need, Jimenez said he also wants to considering training.
“I think we need to look at how we train people and how we move people through,” he said.
To that end, Jimenez recently hired a new chief people office whose job will be to address hiring, training and compensation.
“Those are all things that are not fixable overnight,” Jimenez said. “Some we fixed this summer. We’ve seen positive effects of the fact we hired more people in the last 12 months than in our 63-year history, including licensed mariners, which are really hard to come by. And yet we’ve still got the same problem around resilience – so more work to be done.”
