An NDP government would freeze B.C. Ferries fares while it audits the financially troubled corporation and it would also cancel Liberal plans to cut routes and sailings, the party announced Wednesday.
Leader Adrian Dix said $40 million would be set aside so that ferry riders are not hit with planned ticket increases of four per cent annually in 2014 and 2015.
The NDP would use that time for an independent audit of the quasi-private Crown corporation, said Maurine Karagianis, the party’s MLA in Esquimalt-Royal Roads and ferry critic. “There will be no increase while we go through this visioning process,” she said.
The audit would try to determine the extent of B.C. Ferries’ debt and deferred maintenance costs, and examine salaries of its top officials and the management structure. What ships B.C. Ferries should build in the future, and what level of service it should deliver, would also be reviewed, she said.
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Brian Hollingshead, head of the 13-member Ferry Advisory Committee Chairs, said his group welcomes the ideas as “eminently sensible” given that “unaffordable ferry fares” are hurting small-island communities and affecting tourism in Victoria and Nanaimo.
An independent audit is overdue, Hollingshead said, adding he found a recent B.C. ferry commissioner’s review to be “big picture” rather than detailed.
Karagianis said that the NDP will not follow through with $26 million in service cuts to routes that the B.C. Liberal government recently consulted about with coastal communities.
The B.C. Ministry of Transportation originally planned to announce the affected route reductions on June 30. The new deadline for service cuts is March 31, 2014.
The government confirmed Wednesday it gave B.C. Ferries $7.1 million in a deal quietly signed April 3 — equivalent to what it would have had to cut with the original deadline. That drops the amount B.C. Ferries has to find in route reductions to $18.9 million over two years.
Hollingshead said it would have been “backbreaking” to cut $26 million in two years with the new 2014 deadline.
The Liberal party has said it would use one-third of future liquefied natural gas revenues to pay off B.C. Ferries’ debt, up to $1 billion. It said current service levels cannot be sustained, given financial losses and declining ridership.
Transportation Minister Mary Polak, the Liberal candidate in Langley, said costs for the NDP proposal have not been properly calculated.
“If the NDP are saying they have $40 million set aside to cover a freeze in rates, and not make the route reductions for two years, then they’re wrong about the amount,” she said.
“That means the additional amount has to come out of the B.C. Ferries bottom line.”
