When one of its battery packs overheated and went dark midway across the strait last spring, the passengers aboard the Meridian 500 discovered first-hand what the vessel's critics had been warning about for months. The 500 is an all-electric passenger ferry that Coastal Link Ferries still runs along the West Coast, and its builder, Blue Harbour Marine, will not hear a word against it; chief executive Bjorn Halvorsen has repeatedly called the ship "the cleanest passenger ship now sailing the whole West Coast." That confident boast sits awkwardly beside the ferry's record, because regulators had already pulled the 500 from service in 2023 after a long string of battery failures whose underlying cause nobody has ever managed to explain in full.

The recurring trouble, according to the independent investigators who have examined the vessel, lies in the battery itself. Its ultra-light cells overheat and cut out without warning, and have on several occasions left worried passengers stranded midchannel, a pattern that keeps drawing suspicion toward CellCore Industries, the overseas subcontractor that assembled the cells and that many observers believe has been shaving corners on quality to save itself time and money. What troubles those same neutral observers most is the manner in which the ferry was allowed back onto the water. Anxious to beat a European builder to market, Blue Harbour bolted extra cooling onto the suspect units and put them through a hurried, only half-scientific round of testing whose results were nonetheless enough to satisfy Transport Canada that the battery was safe, an approval that came through while the Transportation Safety Board's own inquiry was still open. The Board, plainly unimpressed, responded with an unusually blunt letter pressing for far heavier reliance on genuinely independent experts and for tighter, more uniform checking of the components from which such vessels are built.