Kirk LaPointe: B.C.’s ferry fiasco is a perfectly Canadian controversy

Fingers have been pointed. Ministers disappointed. Sanctimony and hypocrisy abound, doused with double-speak. And a bout of déjà-vu.

In the late 1990s, the BC NDP government was ensnared in an over-budget fast-ferry project that came to be known as the FastCat Fiasco, the procurement of three vessels that ran up quite the bill and couldn’t quite do the job.

A quarter-century later, the BC NDP finds itself in another fraught ferry fumble. This time, the four-ship order doesn’t foretell a technical flop. And we can’t squawk about the cost because we don’t even know the budget yet. No, it’s about geopolitics.

What we know is that provincial tax dollars will go to a Chinese shipyard—no Canadian shipyard even placed a bid—and federal tax dollars will help finance it.

Perhaps in other times the lowest bid by an experienced builder, a value-for-money decision rather than keeping the money at home, would be a savvy call by a province with deficit and debt issues. But in 2025, the context matters more than it might have. In this buy-B.C., buy-Canadian, spurn-China era, this move by two Crown corporations (BC Ferries and the Canada Infrastructure Bank) makes one wonder if they exercised independence while failing to read the news. True, no Canadian could step forward; true also, it’s a big planet, and turning to its largest country is proving a questionable call.

Set aside the decision for a moment and lament the most embarrassing element: the performance of ministers who either knew or should have known and didn’t, and who should have averted the contract. The public might have been surprised by the announcement, but lots of insiders at senior levels of government were in on the deal long ago.

The board governing BC Ferries features a former NDP cabinet minister as chair, a former NDP transport minister, a former NDP MLA, the party’s recent campaign manager, and a prominent former labour leader. Yet BC Transportation Minister Mike Farnworth somehow professed disappointment when the decision was announced, as if this were a job rejection he got by email one morning—rather than a five-year-long process, one that the BC Ferries chair says he has apprised the government about since last summer.

The Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) board is clearly Liberal-appointed if not clearly Liberal-stacked, yet federal Transport Minister Chrystia Freeland angrily wrote Farnworth (her boss considers China our largest threat, after all) to criticize the deal after she read about it and demanded no federal funds be used for it. But—and here is where basic competence is questioned—she seemingly didn’t know her government’s Crown corporation was the financier. Hoo boy.

Among the questions we have, it is fair to ask why a Crown corporation is financing any deal that doesn’t sprinkle low-interest support to employ Canadians. Any significant domestic benefit—given this one involves no Canadian steel, tech, or labour—awaits the refit and maintenance business many years from now.

Luckily for those politicians seeking shelter in the shade, the provincial legislature recessed until autumn as the embroglio emerged and, like the Commons, was gone for summer before news of the CIB bankrolling broke. It is fair to assume this issue will be a wart that grows on their noses for some time.

The BC Ferries CEO and president, Nicolas Jimenez (appointed by the current chair), shrewdly eschews the fray: “When it comes to things like trade policy, industrial policy, geopolitics, I think we would really defer that to the federal and provincial governments and expect them to manage and work those issues.” We see how that’s going.

Jimenez notes that the bank deal at 1.8 percent interest saves about $1 billion; a European shipyard’s bid would have cost about $1.2 billion more. China’s Merchants Industry Weihai Shipyard is an experienced supplier, and no Canadian shipyard has the capacity to do the job.

A way out of this mess might have been for provincial and federal ministers alike to have promised that Ferries five, six, and onward would be produced by a magnificent Canadian shipyard to be constructed in the near future as part of an industrial strategy. Spin of this sort might have suffocated the snarly, rather racialized belief that the ferries will be security risks—if that’s the case, Canada is in a long global lineup of Weihai’s fleet.

But there is no escaping the fact that we’re vesting an important contract with the prime minister’s top security villain in an atmosphere of trade tiffs.

B.C. walks a unique Canadian tightrope with China; north of 15 percent of our exports are to it, compared to Canada’s 4 percent. We have North America’s fastest shipping lanes to China—Prince Rupert’s is fastest, and Vancouver’s is the country’s largest gateway for Asia-Pacific trade. About one-fifth (and growing) of the Greater Vancouver and Lower Mainland population is of Chinese descent.

We conveniently forget the connection when it suits, as seems to be the case for the time being.