March 20, 2012 - 06:26 — Timothy Gillespie
The Scotia Prince Ferry, shown in this 2003 photo, travelled between Yarmouth and Maine until 2005. (Brian Medel / Yarmouth Bureau)
A fresh-off-the-press campaign to restore ferry service in Yarmouth is without one of its poster children.
The Scotia Prince vessel, which travelled between Yarmouth and Maine until Scotia Prince Cruises cancelled the run in 2005, was sold for scrap to an undisclosed buyer in Sri Lanka this month.
Since sailing out of the Port of Yarmouth for the final time, the 1,000-passenger sleeper ferry provided regular ferry service in the Mediterranean from 2006 to 2010 before it was commissioned in 2011 for service between India and Sri Lanka. By December 2011 however, the vessel was deemed too large for the job and was put up for sale.
The fate of the Scotia Prince comes at a time when business owners across the province are being asked to quantify the impact the cancelled service has had on their bottom line.
The Nova Scotia International Ferry Partnership is on a mission to pitch a business case to the province in favour of restoring ferry service. A website launched Monday offers space for business types to share their lost revenues, the lost jobs and the long-term implications if the service is not reinstated.
“We want to take away the myth that people are just blaming the ferry on the fact that their business is down,” partnership co-chair Keith Condon said from Yarmouth Monday. “We’ll weed that misrepresentation out if it exists and then look at the history and show that there is a business case here.”
The partnership, which formed last May, has spent the last year talking with more than 40 ferry operators from across the world as well as municipal and business leaders provincewide. The non-partisan group plans to take these human experiences to encourage the province to step up to take the lead, Condon said.
“People are affected by the loss of service of this ferry all over the province, not just in Yarmouth,” Condon said. “It’s unreasonable to assume that the municipal government has the tools to do this or that that they should be the ones doing it.”
The scope of the impact, Condon said, should be compared to the troubled NewPage Port Hawkesbury Ltd. and Bowarty Mersey pulp and paper mills.
“It’s disappointing that this issue doesn’t get looked at in the same light,” he said. “If we collectively look at the damage, it would be a NewPage-type issue. And the way we do that is to show that with proof … We want to stay away from studies and work with facts. The facts are clear.”
Ferry service between Nova Scotia and New England was operational, in some form or another, for 100 years.
Research completed by Gardner Pinfold Consulting of Halifax estimates that 260 full-time jobs and $16.3 million in tourism spending were lost when the last ferry sailed out of Nova Scotia. After years of declining ridership, international ferry service was terminated in Dec. 2009 when the Nova Scotia government withdrew its $5.65 million subsidy for the Cat ferry, a high-speed catamaran operated by Bay Ferries Ltd.
Restoring service, the report found, would attract 120,000 passengers in its first year and create an immediate economic boon.
The vessel itself, Condon said, would have to offer traditional cruise amenities and provide transportation option for commercial interests, while the business case itself would likely include a start-up government subsidy of three to five years in length.
Whether the provincial government is on board, however, remains to be seen.
Toby Koffman, communications adviser for the Department of Economic and Rural Development and Tourism, told The Chronicle Herald in February that stripping the subsidy was the right move and one the government wouldn’t be going back on.
“Ultimately, the province would make the same decision again,” Koffman said. “Continuing to subsidize the (ferry) would have simply put off the inevitable and taken money way from creating good jobs and growing the economy.”
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