Bob Mackin
The day after China’s Xi Jinping hosted fellow dictators Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un for a military parade in Beijing, BC Ferries rejected a freedom of information request from theBreaker.news for a copy of its contract with a Chinese state-owned shipyard.
On July 22, theBreaker.news applied to see the executed contract, draft contract or term sheet with China Merchants Industry (CMI) Weihai Shipyard for BC Ferries’ four New Major Vessels.
BC Ferries waited the maximum 30 business days allowed under the law for manager of information and privacy, Shauna Rasmussen, to send a letter on Sept. 4 to state that “the records that respond to your request are being withheld in their entirety.”
Excerpt from the Sept. 4 denial letter from the BC Ferries FOI office.
BC Ferries claims disclosure would harm security of a system, the financial interests of BC Ferries, public safety, third party business interests and personal information.
That, despite the B.C. Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) repeatedly upholding the public’s right to see contracts negotiated between public bodies and private entities.
Recent rulings in favour of the public
OIPC adjudicators in June and August decided in favour of theBreaker.news, which successfully battled for copies of the City of Vancouver and B.C. Place Stadium’scontracts with FIFA for the 2026 World Cup.
The taxpayer-owned company announced the contract with CMI Weihai Shipyards on June 10. It sparked immediate calls to scrap the deal — backed by a $1 billion loan from the federal Liberal government — due to national security concerns at a time when NDP Premier David Eby is urging citizens to buy Canadian.
China is a major customer of Russian oil and gas and it supplies components for Russia’s military, thus helping Putin prolong the three-and-a-half year war on Canadian ally Ukraine.
Why CMI? Who also bid?
Under freedom of information, theBreaker.news obtained a heavily censored, eight-page internal report created in April. All but parts of the first and last pages are censored. theBreaker.news has complained to the OIPC, to find out the reasons why BC Ferries chose CMI Weihai and who the other bidders were.
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