MAY DAY RALLY - WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO BE HEARD?
by
William Thomas

HONK IF YOU LOVE THE ISLANDS
Rally organizer Michelle Easterly received high marks from participants for driving a support car loaded with extra blankets, jackets and water for elderly participants, whose passion over the continuing fare attacks on their long-time island homes kept them plenty warm. She also coordinated closely with captains and ferries gatekeepers to insure safety afloat and ashore.

Ferry personnel handed out day-glo traffic safety vests to organizers as the group waved placards at passing vehicles on the Old Island Highway, informing passersby with such slogans as: NO FARE, MR. HAHN; ESSENTIAL SERVICES ARE NOT FOR PROFIT; LOCAL BUSINESSES HURT BY HIGH FERRY FARES; FERRY FARES ARE HIGHWAY ROBBERY, MARINE HIGHWAY 22 REOPENING SOON; THE ROAD HOME STARTS HERE.

Passing cars honked in support, and residents chatted with occupants stopped at the highway intersection, asking how they would like to pay $60 - the current round-trip fare to Hornby Island for car, driver and passenger - each time they drive home. None were enthusiastic. (The two-ticket, two ferry fare to Hornby includes passage to cross intervening Denman Island.)

While pleased with the public's response, many participants were disappointed over the lack of support from their home islands. “There are two thousand people on these islands complaining. And only 70 showed up,” said one attendee. “The next time someone comes up to me and starts complaining about the ferry fares, I'm going to say, 'Gee, I didn't see you at the protest.'”

Easterly pledged that many working islanders who said they could not take a long lunch hour to attend the mid-week rally would get a chance to answer the next call-out, which could come on Father's Day - or even earlier.

A SUCCESSFUL UPROAR
Referring to the bi-annual Ferry Advisory Committee meeting, unknowingly scheduled on the same day of protest at the Denman Senior's Hall, she is calling the May Day ferry fares protest, “A success for other reasons. Because we got to the meeting and I think that was important.”

That conference between potential allies soured when residents already on the agenda entered quietly and were ignored after apparently landing on a blank page of Robert's Rules.

After standing for nearly 10 minutes, Michelle Easterly politely interrupted the discussion, saying, “Excuse me, if you don't mind, we have children who need to get back to school, and I'd like to know where we are in the agenda, and when we get to speak.”

A photograph taken at that moment shows the faces of committee members aghast at someone not following the rules. Unfortunately, their politically correct rigidity, and apparent anxiety over a possible “confrontation” assured that outcome by confirming the suspicions of residents being “represented” by people who could not even acknowledge their presence in the same room.

As the operator of an accommodation on Hornby, Michelle Easterly explained that her business was down 40% because ferry fares as high as $100 for a family of four to visit the island were turning both first-time and long-time vacationers away. Her experience, she added, is widespread among other business owners and tourist-dependent artisans on the island. “I know this because I called my long-time clients and asked them,” she told committee members. “And they told me it was not gas prices but ferry fares keeping them away.”

Easterly also said she has no time for the argument that the semi-privatized ferry corporation does not set fares imposed by an overpaid BC Ferries Board of Directors.

That board, which has recently awarded themselves a collective annual salary increase of nearly a quarter-million dollars after seeing lost revenues mount with each fare increase, has not yet grasped that while dining areas and concession stands allow the “Queens” to be profitable on major runs, the only short-haul ferry capable of meeting its own operating costs is a rowboat. (Hopefully, not too many amateur mariners will drown while attempting to circumvent unaffordable ferry fares by rounding the notoriously rough tiderips off Chrome Island aboard inner tubes and other small craft.)

“If I hire a contractor and tell him to build me a glass house, he will refuse,” this builder of her own home noted. “He will tell me that it can't be done, and he's not going to do it. This corporation, contracted by the BC government, has to tell the government that they cannot operate the way they are being told. BC Ferries has to say, 'We are not going to do it.'”

As the applause from placard-carrying residents quieted to vigorous head-nodding, Easterly also condemned the recent purchase of three big “Super C” ferries now making the mainland to Vancouver Island run with unused passenger decks roped off, and cavernous car decks vacant. “Isn't anyone at BC Ferries anticipating the end of affordable oil?” she asked committee members, many of whom rolled their eyes as if she was speaking Martian. “We need to get out of the box. We need to consider the whole transportation picture” - including shuttle buses and light rail to-and-from island destinations to encourage foot passengers.

Like most islanders, this long-time Hornby resident and business owner also has no use for the new electronic fare card, which, she recently discovered after initially overlooking the smallest print on the card holder wallet and not being informed by the ticket agent, cannot be used on the Mill Bay, Cortes and Denman-to-Hornby runs due to lack of scanning machines at those terminals, because protesting ferry crews have been told, It's too expensive.'

“Didn't they think this through?” she asked the committee. “BC Ferries calls it, 'Experience The Convenience'. I call it, 'Experience The Inconvenience.”

Chuckles turned to gasps as Easterly produced a large pair of scissors and snipped her fare card into plastic confetti. As residents cheered and applauded, horrified committee members recoiled as if she had cut up her draft card.

ISLAND SPIRIT
I spoke next. As someone who has sailed and lived among dozens of Pacific islands, including Gabriola, Salt Spring and Hornby, I attempted to introduce a breather by reminding everyone present that the first people to settle BC arrived paddling umiaks and bidarkas along a “marine highway” all the way from Asia. Everyone who chooses to live here, I suggested, who paddles a kayak, sails the strait, or rides the Denman-Hornby ferries shares this same urge and spirit.

The nodding ferry captains understood.

Like Easterly, I thanked committee members for their work in assuring that our island ferries run on schedule. But I also respectfully reminded them, “If those boats run empty, there won't be any point.”

As a veteran of BC's clearcut logging wars, I have seen again and again how corporate-beholden governments get willing communities to sit down at a roundtable and “negotiate” - while continuing to decimate irreplaceable forests and watersheds. The tactic is called “talk and log.” Now, I fear, it is becoming, “Talk and raise ferry fares.”

"During the five years you have been taking our concerns to government, our ferry fares have doubled," I reminded the ferry committee. In your reluctance to press the fares issue with the provincial government, take care that you do not inadvertently become collaborators in an “ethnic cleansing” of the very people our communities can least afford to lose.

“We need to come together now, as people of the islands, in a unified voice. And - if it comes to that - collective action, as well.”

Perhaps I wasn't forceful enough.

When the committee graciously allotted time to an extra speaker, John West turned up the heat and the volume, attacking committee members for the fare increases they had nothing to do with, and calling the process of opposing political parties hopelessly obsolete.

“I'm sorry, but the people no longer trust you or any political party,” West told a representative for NDP MLA, Catherine Bell. “On the next ballot we want to see 'NONE OF THE ABOVE.' We need a new paradigm. A tribal council model.”

The analogy seemed apt, because at that moment, 25,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union had laid down their tools and walked off the job, idling cranes and container ships, and shutting down 29 west coast ports from Seattle to San Diego "to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the withdrawal of troops from the Middle East" after union members who were Vietnam veterans called for a repeat action by the first labor union to resist that war. (According to workers, the action is “doubly significant that the ILWU chose to do so on May Day, the International Workers' Day, which is typically not honored in the U.S.” As one observer put it, “Dock strikes can be a thousand times more effective than peace marches.”) [uspolitics.tribe.net; socialistworker.org]

NO APOLOGIES NECESSARY
Fallout from that meeting was immediate, with some islanders pleased that their concerns had been put forward in their own voice, and others upset over the lack of civility shown by some visitors and committee members. While acknowledging ruffled feelings, Easterly remains unapologetic.

“I feel that having the protestors go up to the meeting, and having that meeting available to us in the limited way it was, gave us a conduit - whether it was appropriate or not - to get other people to hear us from our hearts. Not from some email letter,” she added, pointing out that messages on a screen “can be turned off, another martini put in their hand, and they can walk away. But you can't turn off a bunch of people in your face.”

“I am not apologizing,” she stated. “I do not think anything like this can happen without people being uncomfortable. This is not fun and games. This is - I say again - our livelihoods. I think probably it's good that people get uncomfortable. And that's what we said, 'We are going to rock the boat.' I didn't hide that. We said that out front.”

With short-staffed ferries and inadequately trained personnel already resulting in the sinking of Queen Of The North with two passengers still missing. Extra expenses up to a thousand dollars a day for transferring qualified personnel between runs to keep short-handed ferries sailing, and recent salary raises bringing the pay for a so far breathtakingly incompetent BC Ferries Board of Directors to nearly one million dollars a year - the boondoggle-plagued ferry corporation has come a long way from its early, relatively untroubled days under the Ministry of Highways. Highways departments still run the ferries in many countries, as well as the BC Interior, where similar runs are free. But no longer on the BC coast, which lost its “marine highway” status under provincial government decree in 2003.

“I have issue not just with the fares,” Easterly also said, addressing the ferry operations people in room. “We have issues with the operation of the ferries. How dare you be politically and financially reckless with our money to go and get these three huge ships from Germany without consulting with the people - 'Hey, would you like some trains instead of a bunch of cars? Just like the Olympics,” she added, referring to the 2010 Winter Games that have so far cost BC taxpayers some $2 billion in preparing the Whistler Mountain venue and shore-based transportation links to this short-lived sports extravaganza.

“I'm livid,” she continued. “How dare you! With the end of affordable oil around the corner, and global warming on the horizon, how did you rationalize this? We've got to start thinking out of the box.”

Saying that she would like to see passenger and freight railcar tracks added to the big ferries - “just like they're doing cross-Channel” in Europe - and the reinstitution of our railways, she reiterated, “I don't get how more big ferries ended up on the Strait with three decks for cars. It's a much bigger picture. If we were looking at transportation as a whole, we probably wouldn't be in the dilemma that we are in. We would be doing something different.”

In response to a resident calling for “some real creative thinking” by the Ferry Advisory Committee, Easterly exclaimed, “We've been thinking. We need some real creative action!

VOLCANO-ROMETER
Check back to gauge how close the ferry-travelling
public is to erupting...