Who is popular today?

An order against non-essential travel between health regions is in effect on a number of B.C. Ferries routes.

Anyone whose travel is not considered essential will be refused a ticket.

Trips affected include those between:

- Tsawwassen and Swartz Bay

- Tsawwassen and Duke Point at Nanaimo

- Tsawwassen and the Southern Gulf Islands

- Horseshoe Bay and Departure Bay in Nanaimo

- Comox and Powell River

- Port Hardy and Prince Rupert

The list of categories of essential travel includes commercial transportation of goods, returning to a principal residence, attending work or school, accessing child or health care, assisting someone needing physical or psychological health care, attending court, search and rescue operations, and attending a funeral.

B.C. Ferries is also not scheduling extra sailings for the May long weekend. Normally, extra sailings are put on for long weekend travel because higher numbers of passengers flock to the ferries.

The company has added a check box to the online booking form on its website where customers must say that they are travelling for essential reasons when making a booking.

Customers are being asked at the ticket booth if their trips are essential, and if they aren’t, they will not be sold a ticket, B.C. Ferries says.

Those travelling on routes running within the same regional zone are being reminded by ferry workers that they should be avoiding non-essential travel.

“B.C. Ferries supports doing everything we can to discourage non-essential travel, and this order gives us the legal authority we need to deny travel for non-essential reasons,” Mark Collins, B.C Ferries’ president and chief executive, said in a statement Friday.

B.C. Ferries will rely on other jurisdictional authorities to help enforce the new order, it said in a statement. No further information about enforcement was immediately available, but B.C. Ferries has used RCMP officers in the past to help deal with breaches of pandemic-related rules.

The company has a zero tolerance policy for abuse, both verbal and physical, towards its employees, the company said.

Any customer abusing an employee will be banned from travelling on ferries.

cjwilson@timescolonist.com