Passengers on BC’s flagship Crown corp. are being asked to swab the decks and man the bilge pumps after a failure on one of its largest passenger vessels.Or hold it.That’s because BC Ferries was forced to install portable toilets on its Queen of Cowchican ferry after all the elevators on the venerable floating parking lot failed on Monday, preventing passengers from accessing the upper-deck washrooms.Instead, customers who couldn’t take the stairs were forced to use portapotties on the main vehicle deck. Customers who need elevator access were given the choice of alternate sailings.The 139-metre long Queen of Cowchican is a mainstay of the BC Ferries fleet that runs from Nanaimo to Horseshoe Bay in North Vancouver. It was commissioned in 1976 and has capacity for 1,500 passengers and crew along with 312 vehicles.The issue had apparently been at least partially resolved by Tuesday, according to the company’s web site..BC Ferries operates 39 vessels but employs 51 shore-based executive directors and directors along with more than 200 mangers and superintendents or one manager for every 18 workers..But it’s just the latest in a string of indignities suffered by BC residents who rely on the service to commute from Vancouver Island to the Lower Mainland, including cancelled sailings, dry-docked ships and a bitter labour dispute that have prompted a wholesale restructuring of the Crown corporation that critics say did nothing but create a half dozen new senior executive positions.Meanwhile, the publicly owned, but privately managed, company has had a difficult time finding and retaining staff to man all its routes, prompting it to cancel thousands of sailings and cut service.That’s even though it had more senior executives than ships at the start of last year; it operates 39 vessels but employs 51 shore-based executive directors and directors along with more than 200 mangers and superintendents. That works out to about one manager for every 18 workers.In December, contract negotiations reportedly broke down after the corporation’s executive director of labour relations told a union official to “just shut the f*ck up” resulting in a $2.1 million claim to the BC Labour Relations Board..It’s all resulted in unruly customers and calls to bring the quasi-independent company back under the auspices of the Ministry of Transportation. Police were called to a public meeting in Gibsons last fall after a disgruntled patron threatened to “take a gun” to company officials attempting to assuage angry residents. About 22 million passengers use the ferries each year.
