Canada reopens its waters to cruise ship traffic

Canada’s Minister of Transport has announced that cruise ships are again welcome at the nation’s ports, starting April 6.

The COVID-19 pandemic stopped all cruise ship traffic in 2020 as Canada closed its waters, and the revenue hit was substantial for Alaska businesses and municipalities that rely on summer travelers. Even when cruise ships resumed limited operations in 2021, they had to bypass Canadian ports and traffic to Alaska was a fraction of past summers.

A major barrier to the ability of ships to sail between the Lower 48 and Alaska during Canada’s closure was the U.S. Passenger Vessel Services Act of 1886, which requires foreign-flagged ships carrying passengers to stop at a foreign port when traveling between two U.S. ports.

Nearly all large cruise ships are registered in foreign countries, and the ships start or stop in Vancouver or Victoria, British Columbia, on their Alaska cruises to meet the requirement under federal law.

Transport Canada banned all ships carrying more than 100 passengers from its waters starting in March 2020, shutting down cruise traffic to Alaska.

Large cruise ships were able to travel to Alaska again starting in late July 2021 due to the U.S. Congress in May passing legislation sponsored by Alaska’s congressional delegation that granted a temporary waiver, allowing ships to bypass Canadian ports on the way north from Seattle.

Ketchikan in 2021 was able to salvage about 8% of a “normal” cruise season in an abbreviated large-ship season that began in July.

“We’ve got so many ships that call in Ketchikan that originate in Canada that it’s pretty serious business,” Ketchikan Visitors Bureau president Patti Mackey said last Friday.

Though Wrangell does not see nearly as many cruise ships as Ketchikan and other Southeast ports, which are visited by ships with 3,000 or 4,000 berths, the community is on the itinerary this summer for maybe half a dozen foreign-flagged cruise ships with capacity for several hundred passengers each.

Many of the smaller vessels that stop in Wrangell are U.S.-flagged and not subject to the requirement that they stop in Canada, or they spend their entire summer in Southeast Alaska and don’t need to deal with the Canadian issue.