Premier David Eby rules out cancelling BC Ferries' China-built ships contract
As well, reopening the procurement process “would mean significantly increased costs,” said Eby. “I’m not prepared to do that.”
“The decision to reopen, revisit a five-year procurement process, reopen the procurement process, [and] re-award contracts is not just a billion dollar decision. It is well in excess of that when you’re re-tendering, again, in an inflationary environment.”
The Premier acknowledged that he was “not happy with the result” and that this was “not my preferred outcome,” adding that the provincial government had previously communicated its concerns to BC Ferries.
He says Mike Farnworth, the B.C. Minister of Transportation and Transit, was first informed by BC Ferries of the decision to award the contract to China Merchants Industry Weihai Shipyards (CMI) 30 days before the public announcement on June 10. Today’s media briefing marked the first time Eby publicly addressed the controversy, following his return from a 10-day trade mission to Asia earlier this month. The trip, which included stops in Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia, was aimed at promoting British Columbia and diversifying the province’s economy beyond its heavy reliance on the United States and China, Eby said.
New effort to ensure future ferries are built in B.C., says Eby
Another key concern is that BC Ferries did not receive any bids from Canadian shipyards, which has been a longstanding trend for nearly all of the ferry corporation’s procurements for the past 20 years. It should be noted that European shipyards have won nearly all of BC Ferries’ shipbuilding contracts in recent decades, with Canadian shipyards repeatedly opting out to bid generally because they do not believe they can be price competitive and ultimately win.
Some of Canada’s largest shipyards, including B.C.’s Seaspan, are currently preoccupied with decades worth of multi-billion dollar contracts with the federal government to build new ships for the Canadian Coast Guard and Royal Canadian Navy.
“Not a single Canadian company would feel they had the capacity to build those ferries. And so not a single Canadian company bid on that contract. This is obviously a surface issue,” said Eby.
“And you know, in some ways, it’s positive that our shipyards here in B.C. are busy with federal shipbuilding contracts, but in other ways it really tells a story about the hollowing out of the shipbuilding industry in the province that’s taken place over the last 50 years.”
Eby instead said the focus now should be to work towards boosting the B.C. shipbuilding industry so that BC Ferries’ future additional orders of new major vessels can be built domestically, given that the ferry corporation has plans to order up to an additional four new major vessels over the next 10 to 15 years. The Premier said he will reach out to Prime Minister Mark Carney to establish a potential shipbuilding strategy.
“I see an opportunity for us to work with federal government to ensure that ferries five through eight are delivered right here at home,” said Eby.
“So we’ve got work ahead of us, no question. This has clearly illustrated a serious issue for us to work with the federal government on.”
Seaspan Shipyards in North Vancouver (Seaspan)
However, a 2024 advocacy campaign led by Seaspan, supported by various local unions and suppliers, called on BC Ferries to build the new major vessels in B.C. But in response to the campaign, BC Ferries said it would need significant provincial and federal government funding in order to build the fleet’s new largest ships in Canada, as it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions more to build the vessels domestically.
Under the previous corporate leadership, in 2021, BC Ferries indicated it had proposed to the provincial and federal governments its plan to build seven Island Class battery-electric vessels in Canada. But these small ships — far smaller than the unnamed new major vessels to be built in China — would only be domestically built if both governments provide funding to cover the higher costs, which were at the time estimated at over $1 billion.
This appeared to be a response to the B.C. NDP’s earlier commitment to revitalize B.C.’s shipbuilding industry — including the awarding of ferry contracts — under former Premier John Horgan’s leadership.
“For years, shipbuilding was being outsourced to other countries — leaving BC workers and companies behind,” said Horgan in a statement in October 2020 during the provincial election campaign.
“Our long-term strategy is about making strategic investments that will keep B.C. shipyards modern and competitive, able to win more contracts and create more jobs. The shipbuilding and marine industry in this province has become a critical and long-term economic engine, and we need to preserve and protect it. The Shipbuilding Strategy for B.C. represents an important next step in that journey.”
But in early 2024, following a procurement process, BC Ferries announced Damen Shipyards Group — the same European shipyard that built BC Ferries’ first six Island Class vessels between 2019 and 2021 — will build an additional four vessels of the same class. Presumably, BC Ferries was unsuccessful with its funding request made to the governments.
BC Ferries’ seventh new Island Class vessel launched into the water at the Damen Galati Shipyard in Romania on May 22, 2025. (Damen)
It is also worth noting that the provincial government has been running persistently high budget deficits and has accumulated record levels of debt since the onset of the pandemic, with no clear path to significantly narrowing the fiscal gap — now further complicated by worsening economic fundamentals and global trade tensions. As a result, there is limited fiscal room for new major capital investments, made evident by this year’s austerity-focused budget announcement. The province is forecasting a deficit of nearly $11 billion for the 2025/2026 fiscal year, gradually decreasing to $10.2 billion in 2026/2027 and $9.9 billion in 2027/2028.
BC Ferries first publicly announced its plan in 2018 to build five new major vessels to replace aging ships built in the 1970s and early 1980s. At the time, the aim was to have the first new replacement of a C-class vessel by 2024.
But then the pandemic struck, leading to a sharp decline in BC Ferries’ revenues and overall financial performance during the first few years of the crisis. The new major vessels project faced years of delays, during which time the global shipbuilding industry was also hit by soaring costs for labour, materials, and equipment, and, more recently, a surge in demand for new and converted ships — creating significant backlogs at shipyards, including some in Europe that BC Ferries had previously worked with.
Costs for shipbuilding have gone up by 40 per cent since 2020, and Chinese shipyards now account for over 50 per cent of global shipbuilding activity.
BC Ferries also spent the last few years working with naval architects and engineers to create a template design for the selected shipyard of the new major vessels contract to follow. This is the first time BC Ferries created its own ship design, instead of relying on the selected shipyard to come up with a design. This is intended to be BC Ferries’ future design for all new major vessels, enabling interoperability and simplifying maintenance.
“BC Ferries went through a five-year procurement process, which I, you know, struggled to understand five years, but that’s what happened,” continued Eby.
Preliminary conceptual artistic rendering of the New Major Vessels. (BC Ferries)
“We need the ferries urgently, and we’ve got to go,” says Eby
On June 10, Nicolas Jimenez, who has been the CEO of BC Ferries since March 2023, emphasized the value the Chinese shipyard was bringing and the challenging variables the ferry corporation was facing when going into the market for its procurement.
“The cost to build these is more than what would have been true if we had done this four years ago, five years ago,” said Jimenez.
“When we looked in the context of all the yards from Europe and elsewhere, in some cases, there were two times the cost of yards outside of China, where we ultimately went. So we’re looking for essentially the best yards, but we’re also looking for the yards that can deliver the best value. And that’s what we see today.”
To preserve its ability to secure competitive pricing for future shipbuilding contracts, BC Ferries does not publicly disclose the value of its awarded bids. However, when asked by media last week, Minister Mike Farnworth revealed that the lowest-cost bid submitted by a European shipyard was $1.2 billion higher than the winning bid from the Chinese shipyard.
Jimenez also suggested that other shipyards that submitted a bid were not necessarily aligned with BC Ferries’ timely delivery schedule of receiving the four vessels between 2029 and 2031 at approximately six-month intervals. There is an urgency to receive the ships sooner than later, given the need to not only boost capacity but also retire aging vessels with increasingly poor reliability.
“In some ways, we feel very fortunate that timing was such that we were able to find this yard with an order book that could take our order, even though the ship building market has increased substantially since 2020. Coming out of the pandemic, there was a proliferation of ship building, not just in our business, but tankers and others,” said Jimenez.
“And so the costs have generally seen unprecedented growth in the last four years. Will that be true for the next four to 10 years? Who knows? But where we are today is in a market that is more than what it would have been. And yet we feel like we have an incredible deal relative to what we were seeing with other bids in our process. So we feel like we’ve got tremendous value.”
Spirit of British Columbia vessel of BC Ferries. (EB Adventure Photography/Shutterstock)
In early April, Jimenez expressed deep disappointment in the independent BC Ferries’ commissioner’s decision to not approve an order of five new major vessels, instead approving four. The commissioner expressed concerns specifically relating to how an order for an additional vessel at this time could impact the ferry corporation’s financial performance and place an even greater upward pressure on fare increases.
At this juncture, BC Ferries had already internally identified the Chinese shipyard’s bid to be the preferred contractor. The ferry corporation’s position was that a fifth ship in this order batch would have come at a relatively incremental cost, resulting in long-term cost savings and providing an added boost to the fleet’s capacity, reliability, and resiliency.
“This is the most affordable a fifth vessel will ever be due to what we describe as unique market conditions, fixed-price bids, and economies of scale. Building a series of five ships right now will be significantly cheaper than building one or two at a time,” said Jimenez in early April.
“What’s more, independent market experts agree that the favourable conditions for the current ship building procurement processes that we’ve been conducting will not be repeated, meaning that cost for future ships and fare pressures will certainly be higher tomorrow than they are today.”
Eby today also underscored the urgent need to expand BC Ferries’ capacity to address growing concerns over long waits, service delays, and increasing unpredictability.
“We don’t leave families sitting on the tarmac waiting for a ferry, because the propeller fell off because it’s 50 years old,” said the Premier, referencing the Queen of New Westminster’s recent 200-day unscheduled maintenance work after its propeller detached and caused an oil spill.
“We need the ferries urgently, and we’ve got to go. I won’t ask families to sit around with the dog sweating in the car for a four-sailing wait, because the ferries are down on a long weekend for the amount of time that’s required to get a 50-year deficit in ferry building reconstructed,” continued Eby.
“I want ferries built here at home in Canada. But I also know that we need ferries built right away for families that are ferry dependent here on Vancouver Island and across the province. It’s urgent, and I treat that with urgency. And so, we’re going to make sure that families are supported, businesses are supported… we’re ferry dependent.”
Vehicle lineup at BC Ferries’ Horseshoe Bay terminal. (Daniel Chai/Daily Hive)
“Unwilling to stick to his words of ‘Buy B.C. and ‘Team Canada'”
In response to Eby’s remarks today, Harman Bhangu, MLA for Langley-Abbotsford and the Conservative Official Opposition Critic for Transportation and BC Ferries, issued a statement, reiterating his previous calls for the provincial government to cancel the contract.
“Today we saw what kind of a man David Eby really is. A man who is willing to sell out B.C. workers to save a few dollars. A man who has no problem doing business with a regime that Prime Minister Mark Carney is one of Canada’s largest threats. A man who is completely unwilling to stick to his words of ‘Buy B.C. and ‘Team Canada’ and instead looks for the easy way out,” said Bhangu in a statement.
“British Columbians who work hard to pay their bills want a government that has their backs, not one that outsources jobs to other countries. The Conservatives will continue to fight for workers, build B.C. jobs, and be morally courageous in the face of threats from abroad.”
The ferry corporation’s decision was also sharply condemned by the B.C. Building Trades, which represents dozens of local craft construction unions, including those who work in local shipyards. They added to the calls to cancel the order to the shipyard in China.
“Canadian jobs should always come first, but in today’s economic climate, it is more important than ever that governments prioritize the spending of tax dollars locally and focus efforts on creating family-supporting jobs for British Columbians. BC Ferries has failed in the national call to action to support and buy locally produced goods and services. There were zero local content requirements in the bid — effectively freezing B.C. shipyards and B.C. workers out of the bidding process,” reads an open letter by Brynn Bourke, the Executive Director of B.C. Building Trades, on June 13.
“While every other major Canadian industry is looking to reshore work, invest in local communities and deepen our autonomy, BC Ferries is moving in the opposite direction.”
Bourke noted that the BC Ferries vessels built in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s — soon to be replaced by the new major vessels — were well-constructed in shipyards in Vancouver and Victoria, have far exceeded their original life expectancy, and provided valuable experience for local workers in building large vessels.
The fleet’s current largest vessels, the Spirit of British Columbia and Spirit of Vancouver Island, were both built in the early 1990s by local shipyards in North Vancouver and Esquimalt.
“A generation of B.C. Building Trades members earned their apprenticeships on these vessels. They stayed in their communities, invested in the local economy and spent the following decades building infrastructure across the province,” continued Bourke.
“With the right procurement structure, BC Ferries could have easily leveraged B.C.’s world-class shipyards. Just recently, Seaspan expanded facilities to support federal shipbuilding contracts. Everyone recognizes the value a domestic shipbuilding industry plays in ensuring our national security.”
However, the relatively more recent legacy of BC Ferries’ infamous trio of PacifiCat fast ferries — large high-speed vessels originally intended to serve routes between Metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island — continues to cast a long shadow over B.C.’s shipbuilding industry. The fast ferry fiasco — marked by costly, underutilized vessels plagued with problems and ultimately sold for a fraction of their construction cost — played a major role in the complete downfall of the previous B.C. NDP-led provincial government about 25 years ago.
Some of the most common concerns raised about awarding the contract to a Chinese shipyard include potential issues with safety standards, working conditions, and construction quality. BC Ferries, however, maintains confidence in its decision — citing site visits conducted before the contract was awarded and its plan to station a full-time professional team at the shipyard to oversee all aspects of the construction process, including the work of subcontractors and suppliers.
However, additional concerns have been raised around trade, international relations, and national security — issues that BC Ferries leadership has stated fall outside the scope of its procurement considerations.
A growing number of international media reports have flagged the potential for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in the coming years, warning that China is leveraging its state-owned shipyards to expand naval warfare capabilities. This includes using private shipbuilding contracts to strengthen the capacity and technical expertise of its shipyards.
- You might also like:
- China-built major ships for BC Ferries draw mounting backlash, spark calls for contract cancellation
- BC Ferries selects state-owned shipyard in China to build four new major vessels
- BC Ferries approved to order four new major vessels, instead of five
- BC Ferries orders four new hybrid electric ferries from European shipyard
- Should BC Ferries' new big ships be built in British Columbia's shipyards?
- Opinion: BC Ferries needs more new big ships much sooner than later
- BC Ferries warns of 30% fare hike in 2028 amid rising costs