Well, this is a disturbing new twist in a battle that’s left a bad smell over floatplane operations in Vancouver for way too long already.
Business In Vancouver is reporting that the provincial government is refusing to release the independent safety study of the new $22-million floatplane terminal in Vancouver that it commissioned last year.
I’ve got some questions about that, and I’ll get to them in a minute. First, some background.
The business newspaper BiV filed a freedom-of-information request in January asking for the safety report as a bitter battle was playing out over everything from fees for using the new Coal Harbour terminal to how safe its design was.
Months earlier, as the battle hit a fevered pitch, Harbour Air, the province’s biggest floatplane operator, lost a plane at the new terminal’s dock. (The company that built the terminal quickly did its own “independent” study of the dock the plane was tied to and ruled that everything was fine, but that’s another story.)
Harbour Air didn’t move into the new terminal when it opened in early 2011 (and it still hasn’t) because of concerns about the design, safety and exposure of the new terminal to waves and wakes.
But it agreed last November to tie one of its planes up there as part of an engineering test of the terminal; while tied up to the dock, the plane took on water and began to sink — something that had never happened to one of the airlines’ planes, Harbour Air said.
The engineering report commissioned by the province was to have been in the hands of Jobs Minister Pat Bell by late last year. He has never released it publicly, or said what it concluded about safety and design of the new site.
Now PavCo, the Crown corporation that runs the terminal and the convention centre it is attached to, is refusing to release it too. Business In Vancouver is reporting that its request for a copy was turned down over concerns its release could be “harmful to the financial or economic interests of a public body” and to the “business interests of a third party.”
So much for open government, eh?
The saga of the new floatplane terminal has been a sorry mess.
It began in 2003 when the new convention centre was conceived and the floatplane fleet was told it would be moved to a temporary site during construction.
Talks about plans for a permanent terminal in the new convention centre were rocky. Operators were worried that a single private operator would have a monopoly and that it might charge fees too high to pass along without badly affecting their ticketing prices.
They were especially worried when the newly formed PavCo granted the right to build the private terminal to the Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre, a joint effort of Graham Clarke and construction giant Ledcor.
So the companies that operate the planes got together and tried to get approval to build their own permanent terminal, for about $12 million, to the east of Canada Place.
They got nowhere.
They had to move into the new terminal built by Clarke and Ledcor — essentially, a monopoly operation handed to a private developer by PavCo, the Crown agency that runs the new convention centre.
The story took a lot of messy twists and turns, with accusations and denials flying thick and fast. You can read some of them here and here and here.
Me, I have two questions of my own. I hope a journalist with enough clout to ask them, and enough budget to file their own FOIs, will get them answered:
1. This group of floatplane operators spent time and money trying to open their own terminal and run it, roughly speaking, as a co-op. It is widely rumoured that they approached the Vancouver Airport Authority either for advice or to arrange a deal to have the authority run it for them. It is also widely rumoured that they got nowhere with their request.
Graham Clarke, who was chair of the airport authority at the time the operators would have come in to talk, later left the airport authority to build the new terminal himself.
There’s nothing up with that, right?
2. The floatplane operators also had to deal repeatedly, over time, with Port Metro Vancouver as they attempted to get approval to open their own terminal east of the convention centre, in an area controlled by the port. They got nowhere with that either, and in the end were left with one option: becoming tenants of a terminal built by Mr. Clarke.
Anne Bancroft-Jones is a member of the board of directors for the port, which turned the operators down when they tried to open their own site.
I understand that she is also Mr. Clarke’s wife.
There’s nothing up with that either, right?
Maybe someone somewhere could get us some answers to those questions — because when a Crown corporation hands a monopoly to a private developer, and a hugely powerful port authority turns down a group of businesses seeking to run their own facility on the public land that the authority administers, we deserve answers.
When the chatter and the rumours are so widespread on the waterfront — and through the industry — that they wash up on my doorstep, it would be really nice to know if there’s anything to them.
Oh, and that safety report we all paid for? It would be nice to have a copy of that too.

