Crossing Wide Waters

Last month, when some residents of Point Roberts offered some complaints about Whatcom County’s lack of generosity/financial fairness toward the Point—complaints published in the Bellingham Herald—the Bellingham readers of the Herald complained right back: ‘What did you think you were getting into when you moved to that beautiful but isolated place?’ The implication was that isolation explained everything lacking, and that beauty made up for everything lacking.

Today, I am in Roberts Creek, up on the Sunshine Coast, and the local paper is filled with complaints about ferry service, and the only way to get here is on the ferry because there is no continuous road up the West Coast of British Columbia. It would appear that the B.C. Ferry Corporation’s response to complaints about prices is pretty much, ‘What did you think you were getting into when you moved to that beautiful but isolated place?’

The ferry business is all about the price of oil nowadays and the Corporation wishes to increase the fares regularly on the basis of the rise in oil prices. Seems reasonable, but those in the beautiful but otherwise isolated place are of two minds, of course. Those who make the commute to Vancouver regularly pretty much did not have regular and multiple surcharges to the ferry fare (or unfare, as it appears) when they moved to this beautiful but isolated place. And many people who don’t make the commute regularly but depend upon tourists doing so are worried that the tourists won’t be willing to pay ever more to come to this beautiful but isolated place. What is to be done by a community when forces way beyond its control threaten its economic stability? Maybe it’s like the news of a bad diagnosis: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance? I’m not sure whether we’re at anger or depression, but we’ve gotten past denial, anyway.

I guess we will see in the next few years. Things will change because change is inevitable and although it is good for some people, it isn’t always good for everyone. Change has winners and losers. The Sunshine Coast has been rolling right along on a development boom for the past five years or so; housing prices have skyrocketed, development has boomed, traffic and commerce have both increased. All that was good for some people; but the ferry fare increases, not so good, perhaps for the same people and perhaps for different people. The increases in rental prices, not so good for the people who didn’t own property that appreciated dramatically. When we bought a house here 18 years ago, the highest rental price around (according to our real estate agent) was around $1,000 per month, but now, according to the local paper, it’s almost impossible to find anything for under $1200/month. People want to stay here, want to hold on to a life they had, but maybe they can’t do that anymore.

We have very probably crossed some wide waters in these past few years. And the fare has risen considerably, even in this isolated and beautiful place. It feels like a fortune from a Chinese fortune cookie: ‘A journey will offer benefits against you.’