This column was published in the Chronicle Herald on October 20, 2018.

Will any elected official stand up and call for sanity on the Yarmouth ferry?

The Nova Scotia government is throwing tens of millions of dollars on a failing ferry service when the money could go toward hospital beds, textbooks or debt reduction.

Corporate welfare – in this case, funneling taxpayer dollars to Bay Ferries – is a poor use of resources in any case. The ferry service is an obvious boondoggle with no end in sight for taxpayers covering expense after expense.

The Nova Scotia government needs to sell the Yarmouth ferry, or shut it down.

We now know the ferry service is moving its US terminal to Bar Harbor, Maine – a location that requires at least $4 million in upgrades. You can bet that Nova Scotia taxpayers will be on the hook for a chunk of that change.

To make matters worse, the Nova Scotia government just sent a bill to taxpayers for a different US ferry terminal upgrade. The terminal in Portland, Maine received a $1.5 million upgrade earlier this year, even though that lease was expiring in November.

Now, there’s a new terminal, and a new bill for upgrades.

The peak of the ferry funding insanity may be that the aforementioned terminal upgrades are both in another country. Forget about local roads, bridges and potholes. Nova Scotia taxpayers are paying for infrastructure in the United States.

Fool me once, shame on you. But paying for a second terminal upgrade that isn’t even in Canada? Shame on these politicians.

The terminal in Yarmouth needs upgrades too, we’re told, and taxpayers right across the country are on the hook. The municipal, provincial and federal governments are all contributing tax dollars to that terminal upgrade – to the tune of $9.7 million just for phase one.

What’s the ferry equivalent of a gravy train? Chug, chug.

Then there are the ferry issues. Ticket sales fall well below the Nova Scotia government’s ever-rosy targets. The engine broke and had to be fixed.

On top of all of the terminal upgrades, Nova Scotia taxpayers give the Yarmouth ferry an operating subsidy of $10 million every year. The tab for the 2018 sailing season was $10.9 million.

Since it was restarted in 2015, the Yarmouth ferry has cost Nova Scotians at least $32 million in subsidies.

Over that same three-year period, that $32 million could have paid for about 41 new doctors in the province. With federal statistics indicating that about 100,000 Nova Scotians don’t have a family doctor, it’s common sense that spending on doctors or reducing taxes to attract doctors – or spending on schools, or roads, or police officers (you name it) – is higher priority. 

Yet we hear crickets from our elected officials.

Like with most corporate welfare, the government is flying blind. They have no idea how many people are even interested in traveling from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth by ferry. Nova Scotia Transportation Minister Lloyd Hines admitted that they haven’t studied it.

He and other politicians have claimed that the economic impacts of the ferry are “huge,” but the government has said that no economic impact assessment – not even a questionable one, fluffing up the numbers – has been done.

There’s a total lack of due diligence.

Hines acknowledges that there will be costs for Nova Scotia taxpayers of upgrading the second US ferry terminal, but he doesn’t know how much.

As a general rule of thumb, knowing how much of someone else’s money you’re going to spend is a good idea before you agree on their behalf to spend it.

Can one elected official – any elected official – stand up and state the obvious here?

The Yarmouth ferry is an anchor tied to the legs of Nova Scotia taxpayers. It’s time to cut it loose.

Paige MacPherson is Atlantic Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.