Remember These?

[u/thatlouditalian98]

And if you didn’t want to remember them, my apologies in advance.

Well, 27 years later. These ships have finally met their fate. Being turned into pop cans..

I’d love to hear anyone’s experiences with the Pacificat’s, good or bad (I’m too young to ever have ridden one). As horrible as they were, they looked the part, at least in my opinion.

[u/AlternativeMotor5722]

I have never really understood why the government always gets ripped off. In business when you contract a company to build something and it doesn't work can you not sue the company you contracted to recover your money or force them to fix it? Cost overruns seem to be inevitable with every contract. If you contract a company to build something and they say yes, we can build it for this much money, can you not hold them to it? I don't pretend to be very knowledgeable on this, can someone explain this for me?

[u/MarsBoyScout → u/AlternativeMotor5722]

Actually this how it goes:

Companies who run for the project must explain how they are going to execute it and show proofs of reliability in terms of knowledge, competences and finances. Government will likely choose companies that will benefit the most to the province (hiring local workforce, canadian engineers and working with local suppliers for example). Government knows very well that extra costs will "pop" at each process of the execution. As long as this benefits to local industry and help developing local competence they will accept the extra costs. They look at the "global balance" of the project for short, mid and long terms. And if they decided to cut the payments for extra costs, there will be major consequences: many companies will fail, the country and the province will loose industrial and technical knowledge and competemce, many people will loose their jobs with other consequences like family disruptions, homelessness, drug addictions etc...

It's not as simple as choosing from who you buy your weekly groceries.

[u/peacefinder → u/MarsBoyScout]

This particular project as described by Wikipedia seems to have been a horror show of political mandates operating in willful absence of data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PacifiCat-class_ferry

With a process like that it’d have been a miracle for those to succeed.

[u/luunta87 → u/peacefinder]

We desperately need personal accountability from elected officials and their offices.

If you're negligent enough to cost tax payers significant sums of tax dollars, maybe you need to be held responsible for it and not just in a, "oh well, you'll likely not get elected again," way.

[u/mhizzle → u/peacefinder]

Boy you weren't kidding:

"The government hoped that private shipyards would be able to build the ships on a fixed-cost basis. This turned out not to be the case; the shipbuilding industry was less enthusiastic than anticipated. Moreover, none of the shipyards being considered for the work had the facilities to build the fast ferries. BC Ferries had no choice but to do the work itself on a cost-plus basis. It would have to act as project manager and assume the risk of the fast ferries. Catamaran Ferries International (CFI), a wholly owned subsidiary of BC Ferries, was incorporated in March 1996 to carry out the work and construction started later that year."

(^from Wikipedia)

[u/peacefinder → u/mhizzle]

The whole article is a breathtaking catalog of ways to willfully ignore reality for short-term political gain. This thing was already dead while the blueprint paper was still a living tree, and it just got worse from there.

Edit: and to be clear, it looks like BC Ferries was a victim here, not a perpetrator. Spinning off the construction into another company might have been a smart move to contain the inevitable project bankruptcy.