Project Update - August 18, 2021

Work Continues with the Ferry Advisory Committees

We continue to work closely with our Southern Gulf Islands and Salt Spring Island Ferry Advisory Committees (FACs) in reviewing and evaluating schedule options for community feedback. We have completed an initial review of potential schedules with the FACs and an employee working group and we are now in the process of reviewing and refining options based on their feedback. We will meet with the Committees again before we bring schedules to the community for review this fall.

We would like to thank all our FAC members once again for their continued commitment to this process. We are grateful for their time and involvement.

Fall Community Engagement

We are taking time to ensure we have responded to the feedback provided from the community, our employees, and our FACs on schedule options wherever possible. This means we are extending our timelines slightly and have earmarked the next round of community engagement for later this year. This extension will not compress our timelines for schedule implementation, and will not impact our ability to respond to community feedback on the options.

Engagement will be active for one month and will offer many opportunities to provide feedback, including:

  • Online through our engagement page
  • Through virtual community meetings/workshops, and
  • At an in-person event on each island


We are in the Midst of a Complex Process

The Southern Gulf Islands is our most complex scheduling region, serving five islands (Saturna, Pender, Mayne, Galiano, and Salt Spring Islands) from two major ports (Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen) and connecting the five islands to each other. Building the interconnected schedules for this region is a particularly challenging process. Imagine building a house, where the movement of one support beam means the rest of the structure must also shift in order maintain the integrity of the house. The same is true when building schedules, moving even one sailing time or changing one port sequence means every other element of the interconnected five-island schedule must also shift to compensate.

We are hard at work revising schedule options in response to the valuable feedback provided by our FAC members from each Island. It is time consuming and complex work and we are grateful for your patience as we do this. We know you are eager to see schedule options and we look forward to sharing them with you this fall.


Please stay tuned to this page for the latest project information and plans. We will provide regular updates as we work our way through these next couple of months so you remain apprised of our progress and plans.

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