Isolation Times Two

Isolation calling. In Point Roberts, the border is the isolating factor. The border keeps me at home because the mere possibility of border problems often leads me to not bother to go there unless I have to. Of course, it’s an inclination that’s pretty easy to get past. On the Sunshine Coast, it is the Ferry Corporation that is the isolating factor. Although the Coast is on the Canadian mainland, it is like living on an island because there are no roads that lead to here: water crossing only. I assure Ed that, in an emergency, he can paddle his kayak over to the mainland and he can strap me to the side, the way you’d strap a slain deer onto a car.

At the Point Roberts’ border crossing, my concerns are about the latent hostility toward individuals. By contrast, meeting up with the B.C. Ferry Corporation is a sublimely impersonal experience. You’re just a number to them and a profoundly uninteresting number, I’d guess. They decide when they’re going to offer you a ride; they decide the cost; their buildings, their roads, their ships: take ‘em or leave ‘em. You got a problem with that? Sorry. Their mission, they say, is ‘to provide safe, reliable and efficient marine transportation services which consistently exceed the expectations of our customers, employees and communities, while creating enterprise value.’ It’s the enterprise value that seems uppermost in their mind, though. The expectations are clearly not the big show.

Right now, people up on the Coast indeed have a problem with all that because they feel a tad hostage to the Corporation’s idea of its mission. The Ferry Corporation, which used to be a Crown Corporation—i.e., a government agency--was privatized in 2003, and now finds that this run is not sufficiently rewarding from an economic perspective as a steady operation. It finds it more interesting in the summer when the tourists line up to come here than in the other seasons when it’s just the cranky locals. I guess their theory is that we should all just stay put up here and not be wanting to go to Vancouver. It’s a variation of the Whatcom County view that everybody in Point Roberts knew what it was like when they moved there, so why are they complaining? Similarly, you knew when you moved to the Coast that ferries didn’t run every hour, so why are you complaining?

The current unhappiness is a result of the Corporation’s decision to eliminate two sailings a week—one early Sunday morning and one on Saturday evening-- which it assures us is actually not a problem because they will add to sailings in the summer and somehow it will all add up to the same number of yearly sailings. They complain accurately that these two sailings--which have been provided for many, many years--are underused. Of course they are thoroughly used by the people who use them. Perhaps those users could encourage more of their neighbors to go to Vancouver at 6:20 Sunday morning. Probably not. In any case, it appears that it is the tourists, not the residents who will benefit here…the tourists and the Ferry Corporation, of course, which will sell more tickets in the summer.

The underlying problem is that many people on the Coast think the ferries are a part of British Columbia’s highway system and the Ferry Corporation thinks it is running a transportation business, sort of like moving containers around. You get the same kind of disconnect down at the Point Roberts border where Homeland Security sees itself as in the cops and robbers business, while the residents see the border folks more like conductors on a bus whose job is largely to take tickets and help out in an emergency. The way to avoid problems with them both, of course, is just to stay at home once you get home. Once you get used to the isolation, you might like it.