Within the last one hundred and thirty years,
the coasting tirade of British Columbia has passed through
four more or less distinct stages of development the
era of the early trading monopolist, the Hudson Bay Company
the rise of the small-scale ship owner the growth of
corporate shipping enterprise and in the first half of
the twentieth century, the predominating influence of the
national railway companies, particularly the Canadian
Pacific.
Fast passenger steamers are usually associated
with British Columbia coast shipping, and yet, the more
prosaic tug boats, tankers, and fish packers, if less
spectacular, are just as important to the economy of the
province. Coasting steamers as cargo carriers are, in
fact, in process of being eclipsed by scows and barges,
which, in the sheltered waters of the coast, are more
cheaply operated than self-propelled freighting vessels.
The routes of heaviest traffic on the coast are those serving the areas of densest population on the lower
mainland and central and southern Vancouver Island. Industrial communities, dependent on water transportation, are,
nevertheless, scattered along the entire coastline. As
employment is often seasonal, and labour, transient, flexible
shipping services are essential. Year-round operations on
some routes are possible only because government subsidies
are provided. The highly seasonal tourist trade utilizes
passenger facilities to capacity for not more than three
months of the year.
Finding return cargoes for their vessels is as
much a problem for the steamship companies as for the owners
of scows and barges. In general, coastal liners are the
carriers of general cargo shipped from distributing points;
scows and barges, of bulk commodities shipped to processing
centres.
Traffic trends point to an expanding volume of
cargo shipped in coasting trade, with unrigged vessels
carrying an increasing percentage of the total tonnage.
While passenger ship traffic has declined slightly from its
war-time peak, partly as a result of competition from air
lines, fast new steamers, equipped with automobile decks,
offer an inducement to travel by sea and promise to retain
the bulk of passenger traffic for the ships. The geography
of the coast eliminates any threat of new and serious competition from railway and highway transportation.
High construction and operating costs have been
the chief concern of the coast shipping industry since the
second world war. Costs have more than doubled since 1939,
but rates and fares have not increased proportionately.
In consequence, steamship operations, with few exceptions,
have been unprofitable, and on routes receiving government
assistance, subsidies have sky-rocketed. In the circumstances,
the stability of the rate structure is to be
attributed to the strong position of the railway companies
in coast shipping, and to the government's subsidy policy. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/41503 |
| Date | January 1950 |
| Creators | Schuthe, George Macdonald |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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